Gustaff Van Cromphout - Emerson's Ethics-University of Missouri (1999)

Emerson’s Ethics
Emerson’s
Ethics
b
Gustaaf Van Cromphout
University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London
Copyright © 1999 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Van Cromphout, Gustaaf.

Emerson’s ethics / Gustaaf Van Cromphout.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 167) and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1215-8 (alk. paper)
1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Ethics. 2. Ethics,
Modern—19th century. 3. Ethics, American. I. Title.
PS1642.E8V36 1999
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generous assistance of the Graduate School
and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
of Northern Illinois University.
To Luz:
Feremi ne lo cor sempre tua luce,
come raggio in la stella,
poi che l’anima mia fu fatta ancella
de la tua podestà primeramente.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. Beginnings 7
2. Metaethics 28
3. Self-Realization 57
4. Others 90
5. Everyday Life 115
6. Nature 132
7. Literature 147
Works Cited 167

Index 177
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the debts of gratitude I have incurred

in the course of writing this book. I owe special thanks to Arra Garab
for his careful reading and detailed criticism of my manuscript. I am
very grateful also to three other colleagues and friends: James R. Giles,
William C. Johnson, and James M. Mellard were invariably patient and
helpful whenever I was searching, with near Flaubertian obsessiveness,
for le mot juste. My book has also benefited from the thoughtful
critiques of two anonymous readers for the University of Missouri
Press.
Warm thanks for invaluable technical support and advice are due
to Karen Blaser, Supervisor of Manuscript Services in our College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences.
At the University of Missouri Press I want to thank especially
Mr. Clair Willcox, Acquisitions Editor; Ms. Jane Lago, Managing Editor;
and Mr. John Brenner, Manuscript Editor. Their courtesy, professional-
ism, and expertise made working with them a pleasant and rewarding
experience.
ix
Abbreviations
For references to Emerson’s works, I use the following abbreviations:
CEC The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Edited by Joseph

Slater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
CHS “The Character of Socrates.” In Edward Everett Hale, Ralph Waldo
Emerson: Together with Two Early Essays of Emerson. Boston: Amer-
ican Unitarian Association, 1902. Pp. 57–93.
CS The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Albert J.
von Frank et al. 4 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1989–1992.
CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Alfred R.
Ferguson et al. 5 vols. to date. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1971–.
EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Stephen E.
Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams. 3 vols.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972.
EP “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy.” In Edward Everett
Hale, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Together with Two Early Essays of Emer-
son. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902. Pp. 97–
135.
JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Edited by William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1960–1982.
xi
xii Emerson’s Ethics
L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Ralph L. Rusk
(vols. 1–6) and Eleanor M. Tilton (vols. 7–10). 10 vols. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1995.
W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Edward
Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1903–
1904.
Unless otherwise attributed, all translations in this book are my own.
Emerson’s Ethics
Introduction
A mong the questions that confronted Emerson in the course

of his long life, none was more important and insistent than
“How shall I live?” Some of the writings that survive from his late
teens already show, as Robert D. Richardson has pointed out, that the
question that really concerned Emerson was not “What can I know?”
but “How shall I live?” It was a question he would keep asking for
the next fifty years. The old Emerson of the 1870s was still attempting
to answer, in Robert E. Burkholder’s words, “the question that had
dogged him even in his earliest work—How shall I live?”1
How one should live is the fundamental question of ethics. It was
the question of Socrates, whose attempts to answer it may be said to
have begun Western speculation on ethics proper.2 And scholars such
as Bernard Williams and Martha C. Nussbaum maintain that Socrates’
question is to this day the best starting point for ethical inquiry.3 As
these statements suggest, the term “ethics,” like the term “history,” has
two basic meanings: it refers both to an inescapable human experi-
ence (also called “morality”) and to the philosophical study of that
experience (also called “moral philosophy”). Emerson devoted much
of his intellectual energy to attempts to achieve a deeper philosophical
understanding of the question of how he should live and to find
philosophical grounds for his answers to it. Not surprisingly, he called
ethics “the most important science” (L 1:348) and said that there
1. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire. A Biography, 16; Robert E.
Burkholder, Review of The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, ed. Ronald A.
Bosco, 117.
2. Plato, Republic 352D.
3. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 4; Martha C. Nussbaum, The
Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 428n12.
1
2 Emerson’s Ethics
was “one study that [he] hope[d] to make proficiency in, Ethical
Science” (L 4:145). My book examines Emerson’s understanding of
and contribution to “Ethical Science.”
Ethics stands apart from the other branches of philosophical inquiry
through its concern with the ought—the “resisted imperative,” as Geof-
frey Harpham aptly calls it.4 Emerson’s “How shall I live?” suggests the
breadth of his conception of the ought. His reaching back to Socrates’
question shows that he resisted the all too common reduction of
morality to matters of right and wrong (or “moral”/“immoral”) and
embraced instead the more comprehensive Greek view, according to
which everything of value to the human good and thus conducive to
the good life falls under the rubric of ethics. The reach of ethics as
conceived by Emerson may be inferred from his statement, in his first
book, that “All things are moral” (CW 1:25).
In view of the preponderance of moral concerns in Emerson’s
writings, it is understandable that almost every extensive study of his
thought has referred to or dealt with aspects of his ethics. Surprisingly,
however, no book has examined his ethics as such. One reason for
this lack is the perception that, strictly as a moralist, Emerson tends
to be too general, vague, or obvious, and is thus not very interesting.
Stephen Whicher says that most of his book on Emerson “is to be
read under the invisible running title: ‘All things are moral,’ ” but after
having devoted a few pages to Emerson’s moral thought, he remarks:
I shall not have much more to say about Emerson as a moralist.

His ethical teachings, though unquestionably edifying, and valu-
able in their aphoristic force, are on the whole neither original
nor specific enough to command particular attention. What is
interesting in his thought can usually be discussed without much
reference to virtue and moral law; that fact is one reason why his
thought is interesting.5
A related assumption is that although Emerson was an exciting, even

at times a revolutionary thinker in matters religious, social, and liter-
ary, he remained traditional, and was thus again rather obvious and
uninteresting, in his moral thought. As Joel Porte puts it,
4. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics, 2.

5. Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 44.
Introduction 3
Emerson nowhere shows greater affinity to the [British] eighteenth

century than in his firm belief in the “moral sense,” or “moral
sentiment,” or “Moral Law.” And nothing more amazingly exhibits
what small effect, at heart, a lifetime of reading his European
contemporaries had on his ideas. In this sense at least, one might
say that Emerson never developed at all.6
Over the years I have learned much from Whicher’s and Porte’s remark-
able contributions to Emerson studies, and I am pleased to record my
gratitude here. Their influence on me has sometimes, however, taken
the form of provocation. I would not have written this book had I
not disagreed profoundly with the statements just quoted. As I hope
to show, Emerson was a fascinating thinker on the subject of ethics
and an aware participant in the most advanced ethical arguments of
his day.
Even scholars who have shown enthusiasm for Emerson’s moral
thought have tended to interweave his ethics with other, presumably
more determinate or challenging concerns of his. A distinguished
recent example is David M. Robinson’s Emerson and the Conduct of Life:
Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work. Robinson states that
“although Emerson could arguably be labeled a moral philosopher
throughout his career, that is emphatically true of his final productive
decades,” when he produced “texts indicat[ing] clearly that moral
philosophy permeated all aspects of his thought.” Robinson provides
a subtle and nuanced examination of that “moral permeating” and its
effect on Emerson’s career and preoccupations. As Robinson himself
says, his book
traces Emerson’s evolution from mystic to pragmatist, empha-

sizing his increasing concern with social relations, political is-
sues, and questions of ethical conduct. . . . Emerson’s social and
ethical orientation, though submerged in the middle and late
1830s, begins to grow in response to his loss of ecstatic vision. . . .
Emerson’s turn to ethics as an answer to a fading mysticism was
reinforced by his journey to England in the late 1840s, which im-
mersed him in both social density and technological modernity,
and by the highly charged American political atmosphere of the
6. Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, 68.

1850s, a scene that he entered with two addresses on the Fugitive
Slave Law, among his most rhetorically accomplished works.7
Robinson’s book, in a word, is a masterful study of how Emerson’s

ethical pragmatism became a powerful factor in his later development
and increasingly affected his perceptions of power, politics, society,
and culture.
Another recent and important example of this approach is Anders
Hallengren’s The Code of Concord: Emerson’s Search for Universal Laws.
Hallengren points out that “Emerson the Moralist has never been
studied in full,” and that his “aim is to reconstruct Emerson’s search
for moral absolutes.” He also says, however, that his “purpose . . . is to
detect a pattern: the concordance of Ethics and Aesthetics, Poetics and
Politics in the most . . . representative American thinker of the Nine-
teenth century.”8 What Hallengren provides in his huge, immensely
learned, and unfocused book is a discussion of almost every aspect
of Emerson’s thought and almost every possible influence upon it.
In sum, neither Robinson’s nor Hallengren’s nor, for that matter, any
other book on Emerson that I know of, is devoted primarily to an
examination of Emerson’s ethics as such. My book is an attempt to fill
this important lacuna in Emerson studies.
One of the signal merits of Robert D. Richardson’s biography,

Emerson: The Mind on Fire, consists in its having shown how deeply
implicated Emerson’s ideas were in his personal and social life. To
Emerson, ideas were not purely theoretical constructs but lived and
experienced realities. The Emerson emerging from Richardson’s pages
goes far toward proving the Fichtean claim that “the kind of philos-
ophy one embraces depends on the kind of person one is.” Or as
Goethe explained more amply, in reference to Kant, the philosopher,
like every other individual, has an innate “right to principles that do
not destroy his individuality.” The philosopher, therefore, demands “a
philosophy that accords with his innate inclinations.” Such inwardly
7. David M. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical
Purpose in the Later Work, 182; “Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism,”
6–7.
8. Anders Hallengren, The Code of Concord: Emerson’s Search for Universal Laws, 9
and n3.
Introduction 5
sanctioned philosophy entails that every true philosopher “must cope

with the world in his own fashion.”9 Emerson’s thought certainly bears
the stamp not only of his distinct personality but also of his experience,
which is but another name for his coping in his own fashion with “the
world”—family, friendships, work, social life, politics, and tragedy.
This argument does not mean, however, that a thinker’s life and per-
sonality can fully account for, let alone explain, his or her thought. Giv-
ing thought a Sitz im Leben—connecting it with personal or communal
life and circumstances—may throw light on some of its features but
does not clarify what it is intrinsically. Description of its antecedents,
in other words, does not tell us what it is. Northrop Frye was right in
warning us against “the fallacy of thinking that we have explained the
nature of something by accounting for its origin in something else.”10
Thought, after all, never simply reflects experience but interprets, ad-
justs, sublates, or compensates for it in order to make it fit into its
ideal structure. Ideas, moreover, often develop in ways unrelated to
any experience: they connect, interact, combine, refine in accordance
with “ideal” principles, with laws of thought itself. Thought frequently
does its own thinking. As Nietzsche says, “a thought comes when ‘it’
wants to, not when ‘I’ want it to.”11 Ideas, as a result, often take us by
surprise, appear in unexpected associations, or assume meanings we
did not anticipate.
Although undoubtedly rooted in his personality and experience,
Emerson’s ethical thinking has ultimately, therefore, a content and
form transcending them. Emerson’s thought owes its significance in
large measure to its escape from the confines of personality, time, and
place. As he himself said in 1840,
The great man, even whilst he relates a private fact personal to him,
is really leading us away from him to an universal experience. . . .
The great lead us to Nature, and in our age to metaphysical Nature,
to the invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which are . . .
[Nature’s] essence and soul. (W 12:314–15)
9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre,” Sämmtliche

Werke 1:434; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Gespräche aus den letzten Lebensjahren,”
Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche 23:817.
10. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 332.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse §17, Sämtliche Werke 5:31.
While writing Emerson’s Ethics, I tried to be faithful to the spirit of
this statement. Since my book is not an intellectual biography, I have
made but minimal reference to Emerson’s character, life, and historical
circumstances. Instead I have focused on his ideas themselves and on
the intellectual context in which they achieved definition and depth.
1
Beginnings
E merson’s interest in ethics bore literary fruit early. In his late

teens he produced two essays (both submitted as Bowdoin
Prize dissertations at Harvard), “The Character of Socrates” (1820) and
“The Present State of Ethical Philosophy” (1821), that encapsulate his
earliest substantial confrontations with questions of ethical theory and
practice. For the student of Emerson’s ethics, these essays are valuable
on several grounds. Not only are they important for the insight they
provide into the early thought of a great moralist, but they also already
show Emerson’s unwillingness or inability to conform to the expecta-
tions of his intellectual environment. To a considerable degree, to be
sure, these essays reflect the moral thought and assumptions prevalent
in young Emerson’s academic world, thus helping us to understand
where he started, so to speak, as an ethical thinker. But especially in
his second essay, as Evelyn Barish has shown, he also repeatedly
disappointed his audience both conceptually and methodologically,
though it is hard to gauge how conscious he himself was of this fact.
His ignoring Christ as an exemplar of superior ethics, his intellectual
flirtation with Hume, his omission of any reference to Locke, and his
methodological preference for near-enthusiastic claims over scholarly
demonstration already suggest the independent-minded and assertive
Emerson of later years.1 In ethics as in any other area of thought that
preoccupied him, Emerson would eventually articulate views that were
unmistakably Emersonian. Thus these early essays, by revealing what
he did owe to the ethical thought of his day, also better enable us to
1. Evelyn Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy, 102–4. On Emerson’s confrontation

with Hume in “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy,” see also John Michael, Emerson
and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World, 40–42.
7
appreciate the intellectual distance he had to travel before he could
make contributions that were significantly his own.
I
Although products of a very youthful mind, Emerson’s Bowdoin Prize
dissertations are remarkable for the number of major issues in ethics
they confront. In both “Socrates” and in the early pages of “Ethical
Philosophy,” Emerson succeeded in identifying principles and char-
acteristics of Greek moral thought that are as interesting and contro-
versial today as they were to him and his contemporaries. Emerson
recognizes, for instance, the pervasive intellectualism of Greek ethics,
which considered insight or its lack, knowledge or its absence to
be the cause of virtue or vice. Virtue is the necessary enactment of
one’s insight into or knowledge of the good, whereas vice results from
erroneous views about what is good. Since all humans strive for what
they perceive to be good, vice can be interpreted only as an error
in perception. The different ethical systems developed by the Greeks
were all, in Ernst Cassirer’s words, “expressions of one and the same
fundamental intellectualism of Greek thought. It is by rational thought
that we are to find the standards of moral conduct, and it is reason, and
reason alone, that can give them their authority.” As a result, we have
Plato denying the possibility of deliberate wrongdoing and Socrates
insisting that there is no such thing as akrasia (weakness of will). Greek
ethics did not problematize the will as such.2 Its corruption did not
become a real issue in ethical theory until Augustine.
Grasping all this, Emerson praises Socrates for his great “pru-
dence . . . in the philosophical signification of the term” (CHS 77),
thus showing his awareness that philosophically, “prudence” is but
the Ciceronian translation (prudentia) of phronēsis, a term denoting to
Plato moral wisdom in general and to Aristotle practical wisdom, that
is, “a truth-attaining rational quality, concerned with action in relation
to things that are good and bad for human beings.”3 Emerson further
2. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 81. Plato, Laws 731C, 860D; Protagoras 352A–
358D. Aristotle devotes Book Seven of the Nicomachean Ethics mainly to a critical
examination of akrasia. Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik, 573–74.
3. Cicero, De officiis 1.43; Plato, Symposium 209A; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
6.5.4. The quotation is from H. Rackham’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (Loeb
Classical Library).
Beginnings 9
stresses the primacy of knowledge when he says that Socrates “directs

his disciples to know and practise the purest principles of virtue”
(CHS 79), or when, commenting on the most uncompromisingly
intellectualist of the Greek ethical schools, he writes that “the Stoics
exhibited rational and correct views of ethics” (EP 104). Emerson
rightly concludes that the Stoics were not only the culmination but
also the conclusion of Greco-Roman intellectualism in ethics: “With
Seneca and Marcus Antoninus [i.e., Marcus Aurelius] closes the line of
ancient moralists, and with them the chief praise of human ingenuity
and wisdom” (EP 105).
Emerson also understood that according to Greek ethics the in-
dividual moral life involved rational detachment or disengagement
from the self, or, what amounts to the same thing, rational self-
objectification. Such disengagement and objectification were a prereq-
uisite for ethical self-control. Emerson praises Socrates for his ability
“to investigate his own character, to learn the natural tendency and bias
of his own genius, and thus to perfectly control his mental energies”
(CHS 67). Ethical self-control involved discovering and maintaining
a valid hierarchy among the elements constituting the self. Just as,
according to Plato, bodily health consists in some elements properly
ruling the others, so virtue consists in our identifying the right order
among the principles that guide our actions.4 In the Greek view the
highest such principle was, of course, reason; when dominant, reason
established the proper ethical hierarchy. Emerson’s Socrates was able to
“mould . . . the roughest materials into form and order” and to “create
[his] own virtues, and set them in array to compose the aggregate of
character” (CHS 73).
A similar sense of right order informs Emerson’s discussion of the
passions. He avoids the Stoics’ suppression of them and, in Aristotelian
fashion, he recognizes their value when confined to their proper
function. Victory over the passions is not for Emerson a Stoical freeing
oneself of them, but a bringing them into “such subjection as to be
subservient to the real advantage of the possessor” (CHS 75). Socrates
wisely “endeavored to subdue his corporeal wants so far as to make
them merely subservient to the mental advantage, yet never carrying
it to anything like that excess of Indian superstition which worships
God by outraging nature” (CHS 92).
4. Plato, Republic 444D-E.

The rational moderation reflected in this last statement was central
to Greek ethics. Aristotle famously asserted that moral virtue consisted
in hitting the mean between two extreme courses of action, while
Plato’s Diotima insisted that moderation (sōphrosunē) was one of the
two virtues representing prudence (phronēsis) in by far its highest
and noblest form. (The other was justice.)5 More intriguing perhaps
in Emerson’s last-quoted statement is the invocation of nature as a
moral norm (“outraging nature”). In the next sentence he refers to
Indian asceticism as an “unnatural expression of courage” that has
been wrongly called “an assertion of the dignity of man” (CHS 92–93;
emphasis added). Obviously young Emerson was already looking for
a foundation for ethics less tradition-bound than culture or custom.
This concern is also apparent in his only significant negative comment
on Socrates: “In treating of things which are just, by which he meant
virtuous, he declares all things to be just which are agreeable to the
laws. Modern improvement acknowledges this to be a flimsy and
fallacious criterion, which must necessarily vary under every different
government” (EP 102–3). Socrates’ stress on law-abidingness as the
only defense against individual inclination and social and political
anarchy is here misinterpreted by Emerson as sanctioning Protagorian
moral relativism. Socratic goodness is ultimately “something eternal
and immutable” to which we gain access through “insight into princi-
ples,” through “direct personal insight into the structure of the universe
and man’s place in that structure.”6 My concern is not, however, with
noting Emerson’s misinterpretation of Socrates, but with pointing out
Emerson’s early impatience with what he regarded as an ethic deriving
its authority from convention or tradition and his appeal to “nature”
as an alternative source of ethical legitimacy. Elsewhere, moreover,
he took a less critical view, acknowledging that Socrates was the first
thinker to have rooted “moral science” in “the relations which bind
man to the universe about him” (EP 98–99, 101).
The equation of righteousness and justice with cosmic order and
physical laws was already suggested by Parmenides, almost a century
before Plato. For Plato himself, ethics was inseparable from a vision of
order—not just the order within the soul already commented on, but,
5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.6–9; Plato, Symposium 209A.

6. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, 246–47, 131.
Beginnings 11
more fundamentally, in Charles Taylor’s words, “the order of things in

the cosmos, [which] is related to the right order of the soul as whole
is to part, as englobing to englobed.” Or as Anders Hallengren puts it,
since Plato and other Greek thinkers held that “reason is present in
the order of nature,” they interpreted human rationality as “an active
sharing of the ordering principle of the universe.” From such views
arose the “Law of Nature,” a phrase coined by Plato (kata nomon ge ton
tēs phuseōs) but as a concept given real moral significance by Aristotle
and especially by the Stoics, for whom living in accordance with nature
became the paramount ethical obligation.7
No term in Western culture has had a richer and more complex
semantic history than “nature,” and the complexity is only barely
reduced when we confine “nature” to its meanings in ethics. Emerson
frequently confronted “nature” in the course of his ethical thinking. At
this very early stage he simply adopted the Stoic view that for humans
to live truly in accordance with nature they must obey the law of
human nature, and—since in its essence human nature partakes of the
cosmic logos, the rational principle governing the universe—thus obey
the law of reason. Socrates, as interpreted by Emerson, demonstrated
obedience to the law of nature thus conceived. Although resorting to
“harsh discipline” to subdue “his corporeal wants,” Socrates, as already
indicated, did not fall into the “excess” and “superstition” that “out-
rag[e] nature” but remained humanly natural, that is, rational, and in
this way he became a champion of “the dignity of man” (CHS 92–93).
Emerson’s negative but very interesting comments on Aristotle fur-
ther clarify his early ethical thought: “Aristotle pursues different views
of morals from the moderns, and exhibits unexpected trains of ideas,
unconnected, indeed, by philosophical association; he occupies him-
self long and tediously in ascertaining definitions and in drawing the
boundary lines of moral and mathematical philosophy” (EP 103–4).
Aristotle originated the distinction between theoretical reason (nous
theoretikos) and practical reason (nous praktikos),8 and he considered
ethics to fall within the purview of the latter. Whereas for Plato there
7. Aristophanes, Clouds, ed. K. J. Dover, 245, note to line 1292. Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 122; Hallengren, The Code of
Concord, 354. Plato, Gorgias 483E; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.7.
8. Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” 37.
was a scientific (mathematical, geometrical) absoluteness about ethics,
for Aristotle ethics is rooted in the changeable world of human expe-
rience. For him not just the conventional societal law but also the
natural moral law, though valid everywhere, is subject to what today
we might call, roughly, “evolutionary change” (Aristotle’s principle of
entelekheia). He can say, therefore, that although rules of natural justice
have universal validity, they are not absolute.9
Given this general stance, it is not surprising that, as Emerson points
out, Aristotle endeavored to separate ethics from mathematics—for
the Greeks the paradigmatic science of absolute principles. In the
words of Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, Plato interpreted “moral
discernment” as “an unwavering vision of eternal universal Truth,”
and he presented “moral knowledge as a sub-species of formally
demonstrable, or ‘geometrical,’ knowledge and end[ed] by treating
Ethics as a theoretical Science.” Aristotle, by contrast, was unable to
regard ethics as a science in this sense. He insisted that there was
a categorical difference between the “timeless, intellectual grasp of
scientific ideas and arguments” and “timely, personal wisdom about
moral or practical issues.”10 Aristotle can consequently be considered
an intellectual ancestor of casuistry (in the nonpejorative sense of this
much-abused term), as Jonsen and Toulmin have demonstrated. As
is obvious from the passage quoted earlier, Emerson showed little
appreciation for the Aristotelian approach to ethics. Regarding Aristo-
tle’s attempt to found ethics as unsystematic and even unphilosophical
(“trains of ideas, unconnected . . . by philosophical association”), he,
like most of those he called “the moderns,” much preferred Plato’s
more grandiose, absolutist views, in comparison with which Aristotle’s
careful definitions seemed, moreover, pedestrian.
Emerson remained a lifelong Platonist in his commitment to an
absolutist foundation for ethics. Whereas Aristotle rooted ethics in
human experience and wisdom (his kind of concrete universals),
Plato based ethics on an ideal, perfect, eternal, unique “Form of
the Good” (hē tou agathou idea), which, in A. E. Taylor’s words, “is
the supreme value and the source of all other values.”11 Emerson’s
9. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.7.

10. Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral
Reasoning, 62, 65.
11. Plato, Republic 505A; A. E. Taylor, Plato, 289.
Beginnings 13
early allegiance to this Platonic view is obvious when he says that an

important contribution of Socrates/Plato “should not be forgotten
in ethical history,—that from him is derived the modern custom
of grounding virtue on a single principle” (EP 102). Emerson is,
moreover, quite right about this “modern custom.” As Charles Taylor
puts it, “There has been a tendency to breathtaking systematization in
modern moral philosophy. Utilitarianism and Kantianism organize
everything around one basic reason.”12
Emerson also recognizes that Socrates made ethics into a philo-
sophical discipline, into a well-defined subject of rational inquiry: his
was the first intellect “qualified to institute and methodize the science
of morality” and thus to give it a distinct place “in the circle of human
knowledge” (EP 98, 104). Emerson regards Socrates, however, not just
as a great philosopher but also as a noble human being worthy of the
veneration and love of posterity. Moved by the “grandeur of soul” of
Socrates, Emerson, the young Unitarian, is “irresistibly led to bestow
upon the pagan the praise of a perfect man” (CHS 88). The ancient
world has given us Socrates as “a model of moral perfection which the
wise of any age would do well to imitate” (CHS 59). At this stage in
Emerson’s career, imitation of others and even hero worship constitute
values and are, consequently, important in his ethical thinking. The
image of Socrates bequeathed to us by history is a good that can evoke
our love or enthusiasm and inspire us to efforts at self-ennoblement.
The very presence of that image in our mental life is already a good:
it is culturally enriching, if nothing else (cultural enrichment is itself
part of “the good life,” and in this sense ethically relevant). But more
importantly, what evokes our love or admiration because of the quali-
ties it represents also evokes our desire to be like it, and thus it impels
us to imitation of it. Nobody is morally obliged to imitate Socrates, but
we all have a moral obligation to improve ourselves, and if imitation
of Socrates can become a means to that end, the ethical significance
of such imitation becomes all the more obvious.
The trait that Emerson admired most in Socrates was his inde-
pendence from circumstances—an independence so complete as to
seem preternatural. In Socrates’ case, “exemption from the influence
of circumstances in the moral world is almost like exemption from the
12. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 76.

law of gravitation in the natural economy” (CHS 74). Charles Taylor
has stressed that an important aspect of ethical life concerns our sense
of our own dignity, that is, our sense of the “attitudinal” respect (as
different from, say, respect for our rights) we command, or fail to
command, in the world in which we live.13 We can locate this sense of
dignity in such things as our power in society, our indifference to such
power, our professional competence, our philosophical detachment,
our financial success, or our self-sufficiency. Like Kant and Thoreau,
Emerson located his dignity in self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Given
the poverty and the precarious social position of his family during
his youth, he not surprisingly found Socrates’ indifference to circum-
stances an ideal worth pursuing.
II
Emerson devotes the remaining pages (106–35) of “The Present State

of Ethical Philosophy” to a rapid survey of developments in moral
philosophy subsequent to the Greeks and to an examination of major
questions confronting moral philosophers in his day. Some of the
problems examined by the Greeks keep recurring, and inevitably so.
As Alasdair MacIntyre has reminded us, the history of philosophy—
moral and other—is in some measure “doomed to repeat it[self] . . .
because the sources of so many philosophical problems lie so close to
permanent characteristics of human nature and human language.”14 In
Emerson’s words, “The truths of morality must in all ages be the same;
the praise of its teachers consists in the ability manifested in their
development” (EP 112). To young Emerson, the greatest such teachers
of modern times were Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, Richard Price,
Joseph Butler, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, William Paley, and Dugald
Stewart. The last three especially appear to Emerson to represent
the utmost in modern speculation on the subject of ethics (EP 111–
12, 119).
Plato’s solution to the problem of the supreme principle of morality,
or the foundation of ethics, was not quite satisfactory: his absolute

14. Alasdair MacIntyre, ed., Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, 219.
Beginnings 15
“Form of the Good” proved unconvincing to his most brilliant pupil,

Aristotle, and to many subsequent thinkers. The Fathers of the Church
did not succeed in clearing up the confusion; as Emerson sees it, they
“did little to settle the foundations of morals” (EP 106). Real progress
proved elusive until much later, when
by the rapid advancement of the collateral philosophy of the mind

by the spring imparted by Bacon and Descartes, ethical specu-
lations were matured and improved. It was useless to disclose
defects in the culture of the moral powers till the knowledge of
the mental operations taught how they should be amended and
regulated. (EP 109)
Emerson is here drawing our attention to the predominance of epis-

temology in modern philosophical thought and to the effect of that
predominance upon ethics. His linking, in an epistemological argu-
ment, of Bacon the empiricist and Descartes the rationalist may at first
seem surprising, but he obviously thought of Bacon in a general sense
as one of the great emancipators of the human mind—the Bacon who
promised in the preface of his Instauratio Magna that his work would be
“infiniti erroris finis et terminus legitimus,” “the end and appropriate
termination of infinite error.” It was presumably a similar view of
Bacon that induced Kant, though certainly no Baconian, to choose a
passage from this same preface as the motto for the second edition of
his Critique of Pure Reason. Bacon appealed to critical thinkers of many
stripes because, as Douglas Bush said, “his analysis of the permanent
sources of uncritical credulity [the ‘idols’] . . . is a landmark in the
intellectual development of mankind.”15
Descartes, however, is far more important to Emerson’s argument.
He is called the father of modern philosophy precisely because he
planted the standard of truth firmly within the mind and its rational
processes. Unlike Hegel, who stresses in his Phenomenology of Spirit that
certainty is incompatible with truth, Descartes holds that the criterion
of truth is certainty, but that the only thing we can be certain about
is our mental life and, a fortiori, our mind’s clear and distinct ideas.
In Richard Rorty’s words, “indubitability” is for Descartes “a criterion
15. Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna, “Praefatio,” in Bacon, Novum Organum, 168;
Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 277.
of the mental”; it is no longer the mark of any externally derived
“truth.” Cartesian philosophy inaugurated the “change from mind-
as-[outer-directed]-reason to mind-as-inner-arena.” Certainty rather
than wisdom “became philosophy’s subject, and epistemology its
center.”16 Or as Charles Taylor explains this development, in Cartesian
philosophy
rationality is no longer defined substantively, in terms of the order

of being, but rather procedurally, in terms of the standards by
which we construct orders in science and life. For Plato, to be
rational we have to be right about the order of things. For Descartes
rationality means thinking according to certain canons. . . . Ratio-
nality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather
than consisting in its [correct] vision of reality.17
This “inward turn” had profound implications for ethics. To quote

Charles Taylor once more, “the move from substance to procedure,
from found to constructed orders, represents a big internalization rel-
ative to the Platonic-Stoic tradition of ethics.” Emerson grasped that it
was the Cartesian “philosophy of the mind” and “the knowledge of the
mental operations” resulting therefrom (EP 109) that advanced ethics
by establishing it on the only basis acceptable to moderns, namely, the
mind itself. Whether subsequent moral philosophers were Cartesians
or not was irrelevant to this decisive “inward turn” of moral thinking.
Hobbes (who knew Cartesian philosophy well and who submitted to
Descartes his objections to the latter’s Meditationes de prima philosophia)
not only located the source of ethics in the self but also traced moral
motivation to selfishness or self-interest, thereby provoking a horrified
response that affected moral philosophy for a century or more. Young
Emerson dutifully chastises “the malevolent spirit of Mr. Hobbes,” the
originator of “an important controversy which has been much agitated
among modern philosophers,—whether benevolence or selfishness
be the ground of action” (EP 110). When referring to “benevolence,”
Emerson is presumably thinking of such critics of Hobbes as the third
Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson. But the point to remember
here is that the defenders of benevolence as the source of moral
motivation rooted ethics as deeply in the self as did Hobbesian egoism.
16. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 58, 61.
Beginnings 17
More than the traditional Christian virtue of charity, “benevolence”

draws attention to personal inclination and subjective feeling. It is part
and parcel of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, a term signifying,
in Norman Fiering’s words, “the emphasis in . . . eighteenth-century
British literary and philosophical culture on the constructive role of
the affections and passions (in French, sentiment, feeling) in the moral
life.” The real destroyer, however, of Hobbesian ethics, according to
Emerson, was the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, who in his
Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (not published until
1731) “attacked the system of Hobbes . . . with ability and success,
and modern opinion has concurred in his boldest positions” (EP 111).
But as G. R. Cragg points out, interiorization prevailed also here: the
Cambridge Platonists regarded morality “as an integral law of man’s
being and not as an arbitrary imposition from without”; “Cudworth
in particular” insisted that “self-determination . . . was fundamental
to any genuine morality.”18
The high point of Emerson’s rapid historical survey is his claim that
the “fundamental principles” of ethics “are taught by the moral sense”
(EP 112). He thus introduces a moral faculty and a source of moral
authority that will achieve crucial importance in his ethical thought.
The term “moral sense” was first used by Shaftesbury and given con-
ceptual depth by Hutcheson. It was thus first the property, so to speak,
of the ethical sentimentalists. Hutcheson emphatically associates the
moral sense with the mind’s nonrational faculties. Indeed, D. Daiches
Raphael says, Hutcheson “never considers the possibility that imme-
diate apprehension can be a rational faculty.” Instead he considers
the moral sense to be, in Fiering’s words, “a capacity for immediate,
involuntary (or, in theological terms, irresistible), nonpropositional
recognition of virtue,” or in Richard Price’s simpler language, “a feeling
of the heart” rather than “a perception of the understanding.”19
The moral sense did not remain, however, the monopoly of the
sentimentalists. Thomas Reid, founder of the Scottish Common Sense
school, used the terms “moral sense” and “moral sentiment” to refer
18. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 156. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral
Thought and Its British Context, 10. G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason,
48–49.
19. D. Daiches Raphael, The Moral Sense, 16, 29. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral
Thought, 129–30. Price is quoted in Raphael, The Moral Sense, 104; his statement, though
accurate as a description of Hutcheson’s position, is intended to be critical.
to a faculty that he also called “conscience” and “reason.” As this last
term would lead one to expect, Reid strongly objected to the reduction
of the moral sense to feeling. Even “moral sentiment” meant to him
primarily a judgment, though a judgment accompanied by emotion.20
Reid was a rational intuitionist who held that all humans are innately
endowed with a moral sense that gives them inward access to true
(i.e., objectively real) moral principles and enables them to apprehend
these principles intuitively (i.e., through an immediate, noninferential
cognition of them as self-evident). Although Reid did object to what
he regarded as the extreme rationalism of a moral philosopher such
as Samuel Clarke, he himself considered reason (in its intuitive, not its
discursive mode) rather than sentiment to be ethically determinative.21
In this respect he is aligned not only with the greatest eighteenth-
century ethical intuitionist, Richard Price, but also with the ethical
intuitionism of the Cambridge Platonists.
In various ways all these intuitionists played a part in Emerson’s in-
tellectual development. Daniel Howe notes, however, that the rational
moral sense of Reid and his Scottish Common Sense followers, most
notably Dugald Stewart, was “almost certainly a more influential con-
cept in America” than the sentimental moral sense of Shaftesbury and
Hutcheson.22 At any rate, young Emerson’s definitions reflect a rational
bias. He speaks of “the decision of the moral faculty, which is recognized
as an original principle of our nature,—an intuition by which we
directly determine the merit or demerit of an action” (EP 116; emphasis
added); he refers to “the moral sense, or, as others term it, the decisions
of the understanding” (EP 130). At this point Emerson has not yet
adopted the Coleridgean (Kant-inspired) desynonymization of “rea-
son” and “understanding,” which will profoundly affect his concept of
the moral sense or, as he will prefer to call it, the “moral sentiment.”23
20. Raphael, The Moral Sense, 152–53.

21. Ibid., 166–67.
22. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–
1861, 48–49.
23. On Emerson’s relation to the “moral sense” tradition, see also Merrell R. Davis,
“Emerson’s ‘Reason’ and the Scottish Philosophers”; Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 175–
76; Porte, Emerson and Thoreau, 68–92; J. Edward Schamberger, “The Influence of
Dugald Stewart and Richard Price on Emerson’s Concept of Reason: A Reassessment”;
David M. Robinson, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer, 50–55, and
Robinson’s “The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Introductory Historical Essay,”
CS 1:7, 24–28.
Beginnings 19
Some general comments about “modern ethics” provide additional

insight into Emerson’s moral thinking at the time. He points out that
“the moderns have made their ethical writings of a more practical
character than the sages of antiquity” (EP 114), thus signaling his
recognition that in their response to the two traditional concerns of
normative ethics—value (the nature of the good life) and obligation
(the content of right action)—many moderns have emphasized the
latter to the point of virtually ignoring the former. The ancients of-
ten debated questions of “only speculative importance,” such as the
advantages of “solitude or society” for the life of virtue (EP 114).
The moderns lay down “maxims in morals” to support the transla-
tion into practice of their “systems of . . . duties,” and they “introduce
demonstrations from mathematical analogy” (EP 115). Regarding this
last point, Emerson has in mind the “moral arithmetic” of Bentham
(EP 130) and probably also the algebraic formulae in Hutcheson’s
Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). In
fact, quantification and mathematical procedures had become quite
common in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises on ethics,
the most famous example being, of course, Spinoza’s Ethica ordine
geometrico demonstrata (1677).
As these names suggest, not every modern philosopher considered
duty to be the paramount concern of ethics. But Emerson is right
when he implies that those “modern systems of ethical philosophy” in
which duty is central are indebted to our Judeo-Christian heritage: they
“found . . . these duties on the will of the Creator” (EP 115–16). In the
Judeo-Christian tradition the highest mode of being that is attainable
by a human is the doing of one’s duty, that is, living in conformity
with the will of God as revealed in His commandments. Greek ethics,
by contrast, was above all concerned with the human’s attainment of
eudaimonia (“happiness”). As Ludwig Edelstein puts it, “The funda-
mental problem of all Greek philosophy . . . is the question concern-
ing the summum bonum; and the answer of the Stoa like that of all
systems, classical and Hellenistic alike, is that the highest good of life
is eudaimonia.”24 Once duty becomes paramount in ethics, happiness
becomes inevitably secondary: doing one’s duty for duty’s sake comes
to rank higher morally than living in a manner conducive to the
24. Ludwig Edelstein, The Meaning of Stoicism, 1.

attainment of a good (for instance, happiness). Emerson, moreover,
regarded the eudaimonistic argument as flawed for another reason:
“In ascertaining the will of God [ethics] does not always proceed on
the principle that the greatest possible happiness is intended, for that
this is true, we cannot know” (EP 116).
Emerson is here cautiously distancing himself from the opinion
advanced by many eighteenth-century thinkers that God’s primary
concern is the happiness of His creatures and that, consequently, ethi-
cal life consists above all in the pursuit of one’s own and the promotion
of others’ happiness. Garry Wills has shown how pervasive a role the
striving for happiness played in eighteenth-century moral thought.
Some moralists clearly anticipated the utilitarians. Francis Hutcheson,
after all, coined the basic utilitarian formula: “That action is best which
accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” Emer-
son doubts such claims not only on account of our ignorance concern-
ing God’s will, but also because the history of ethics is riddled with
“disputes on the nature of happiness.” The ancient speculations on the
subject he finds largely “futile.” The “most ingenious” modern theory
is Hume’s, which “certainly discovers great philosophical sagacity” (EP
120–21). Emerson recognizes precisely what the modernity of Hume’s
theory consists in: “Old systems indicated some one external quality
or affection of the mind as happiness; the present plan discovered
it in the condition of mind, without regard to the particular objects
of contemplation” (EP 121). As Allen Wood has pointed out, Greek
ethics from Socrates through the Stoics took for granted the objectivity
of happiness. One’s happiness consisted in one’s orientation toward a
mode or category of life that was thought to be objectively valuable, for
example, the life of virtue, a life in harmony with the laws of the uni-
verse, living in accordance with “nature,” or a life of detachment from
the pains and pleasures of this world. Modern ethics, by contrast, has
made happiness much more “subjective” in both content (“Happiness
consists in a subjective state of mind, such as pleasure or satisfaction”)
and determination (“My conception of happiness has an irreducible
role to play in determining the actual content of my happiness”).25
25. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, 149–64,

248–55. D. Daiches Raphael, ed., British Moralists 1650–1800, 1:284. Allen W. Wood,
Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 53–55.
Beginnings 21
Emerson recognizes the subjectivity in the modern conception of

happiness not only in his comments on Hume, but also when he
speaks more generally of ethics offering “sentiments and precepts
which promote the happiness of man [and] whose exercise generates
pure and tranquil enjoyment” (EP 134). He insists, however, that all
the “ingenious” theorizing of the moralists is unlikely to bring us any
closer to ending “the disputes on the nature of happiness” that “have
been always connected with this science [i.e., ethics]” (EP 119–20). In
fact, modern theorizing has left the nature of happiness more open
to question than ever.26 As Kant said, all humans desire happiness yet
nobody really knows what it is because “all elements belonging to
the concept of happiness are empirical, that is, they must be derived
from experience, whereas the idea of happiness demands an absolute
totality, a maximum of well-being” far beyond any experience (which
is by definition specific, limited, and in any case often disappointing)
and consequently not humanly determinable.27
Emerson considers virtue to have been as controversial a concept in
the history of ethics as happiness (EP 119–20). For him virtue consists
in the performance of duties, and such performance derives its legiti-
macy from “a conformity to the law of conscience” (EP 115, 121). The
entire debate about virtue, “from Socrates to Paley,” amounted to little
more than “a dispute about words” because all moralists ultimately
meant the same thing by “virtue,” namely, “conformity to the law
of conscience” (EP 121). But the status and role of conscience had
themselves become matters of dispute. David Hume, having relegated
morality to the domain of feeling, turned moral judgment into an
expression of sentiment and denied the objectivity of moral values.
According to Hume,
Morality . . . consists not in any matter of fact, which can be dis-

cover’d by the understanding. . . . Morality is not an object of
reason. . . . [A] vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider
the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into
your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which
arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis
26. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 63–66.

27. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften
4:418.
the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the
object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to
be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of
your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the
contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar’d
to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern
philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the
mind.28
Not surprisingly, Emerson condemns Hume’s attempts “to represent

the eternal truths of morality as involved in the same gloomy un-
certainty with which he would envelop all knowledge” and to re-
duce “the laws of morals [to] idle dreams and fantasies.” Fortunately,
Emerson points out, to “this outrage . . . to this pernicious ingenuity
has been opposed the common-sense philosophy . . . which aims at
establishing a code of propositions as axioms which no rational being
will dispute” (EP 121–22). Most important for ethics among the
Common Sense philosophers’ axioms was the objectivity of moral
principles. According to Daniel Howe, the principles known through
the moral sense “were regarded . . . as objective truths,” and for this
reason “intuitions of moral values were entitled to be termed genuine
‘perceptions,’ not mere subjective ‘sensations.’ ”29 Robert D. Richardson
rightly claims that throughout his long career Emerson remained
convinced that such “perceptions” were “inarguable” and provided
“self-evident” truth. By “self-evident” he did not mean obvious or
superficial, but he referred to something that quite literally provided
its own fundamentally inarguable evidence.30 In sum, moral principles
are ontically real in the world in which humans live and move and
have their being.
Emerson also addresses “the rights of man,” the most significant
of which, from the point of view of modern ethics, are “the rights
of person and property, implying the right of self-defence” (EP 116–
17). Emerson’s formulation recognizes the intimate connection be-
tween “rights” and “personhood.” Being a person means having certain
rights—an idea traceable to Roman law but given its first influential
modern expression by Hugo Grotius, who interpreted natural-law
28. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 468–69.

29. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 56.
30. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 538, 563.
Beginnings 23
ethics as a matter of rights, of individual rights: the natural law is

“a body of rights . . . which has reference to the person. In this sense
a right becomes a moral quality of a person, making it possible to
have or to do something lawfully.”31 Grotius thus defines “person”
as a moral agent deriving his or her legitimacy not from the state
or society but from “natural law.” As an individual moral agent, the
person is superior to the state: it will have to derive its legitimacy from
the consent of such moral agents. Given the often-conflicting claims
of the individual and society and the ever-lurking danger of political
oppression, it was “natural” that the individual’s most fundamental
rights were considered to be those of self-preservation and freedom,
that is, maintaining one’s life and liberty vis-à-vis the state, both of
which rights are covered by Emerson’s “right of self-defence.”
Emerson felt no need to spell out the individual’s rights to life
and liberty, not only because these rights are contained in the very
concept of personhood, but also because in the nomophilosophical
terminology of his age “property” (in Emerson’s words, “the rights
of . . . property”—EP 116–17) often designated life and liberty in ad-
dition to material possessions. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Gov-
ernment (1689) provided the locus classicus: “Man . . . hath by Nature
a Power . . . to preserve his Property—that is, his Life, Liberty and
Estate.” In Emerson’s day, Hegel elaborated this idea in his Philosophy
of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821). As Allen Wood
aptly summarizes, Hegel “treats all abstract right as a right of property,
even the right to our own life and body, the right over our inner life
and conscience, and the right to a social status as free persons.” Being
“property,” all these rights are ipso facto things, objects to be possessed;
possessing them is what constitutes personhood. Put differently, per-
sonhood consists in one’s being, uniquely, a subject: in the context of
rights, only the person has subject-status (turning a person into an
object of rights is tantamount to destroying his or her personhood, as
in slavery); everything else has the status of object. In Hegel’s words,
“only personhood (Persönlichkeit) gives a right to things (ein Recht
an Sachen) . . . [and] this right to things (Sachenrecht) is the right of
personhood as such (das Recht der Persönlichkeit als solcher).”32
31. Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace 1.1.4.

32. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government §87. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought,
96. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7:99.
Defining rights in terms of persons (rather than in terms of religious,
political, social, or cultural hierarchies) helps universalize the former
and thus equalize the latter. Emerson appreciates the “leveling princi-
ple” in ethics, which “makes void the distinctions of intellect and the
pride of erudition” and without which “the universe would present
an aristocracy odious to God and man” (EP 117). Emerson’s identi-
fying intellect and erudition as antithetical to the “leveling principle”
of ethics is most significant. Intellectual elitism was inherent in the
Greek association of ethics with philosophical knowledge. Aristotle,
for instance, held that the ability to choose the mean between two
opposite extremes of attitude or conduct was a virtue appropriate to
ordinary people, but that the highest virtue, and hence the highest
form of happiness, consisted in a life of contemplation, which was ac-
cessible only to persons of intellect and wisdom. The Stoics are rightly
honored for having advanced the doctrine of universal brotherhood,
of the fundamental equality of all humans. Yet in developing their
moral ideal of the sage, they revealed a quite unsympathetic attitude
toward common mortals. As Herschel Baker comments, “Obviously,
few could be sages, and in their moral rigidity the Stoics . . . despised
the mass of mankind.” The pride, arrogance, and exclusivism inherent
in their notion of the perfect sage exposed them to devastating criticism
from one of Emerson’s favorite authors, Plutarch. Because of their
reliance on knowledge as the basis of virtue, Kant considered all Greek
systems of ethics to be guilty of such intellectual elitism. He himself,
by contrast, asserted the value and correctness of the fundamental
moral insights of common humans, whom he always considered
most worthy of respect (achtungswürdigste). Their moral insights, Kant
believed, usually have more value than those of philosophers, who are
all too often misled by arrogance and confused thinking.33
For this democratization of ethical authority, Emerson needed no
instruction from Kant. Reid and his Scottish associates had developed
33. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.7–8. Herschel Baker, The Image of Man, 77;
Plutarch, Moralia 75A-86A (“Quomodo quis suos in virtute sentiat profectus”). Im-
manuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft B xxxiii; Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,
Gesammelte Schriften 4:404. Although I use the Gesammelte Schriften for all citations
from Kant, I follow traditional scholarly practice in making page references to either
the first (A), or the second (B), or both editions (A/B) of the Critique of Pure Reason
(1781, 1787).
Beginnings 25
a similar position. They were, after all, the apostles of common sense.
As Daniel Howe remarks, “Their philosophy was, in a way, a ‘no-
philosophy’ or an ‘antiphilosophy.’ . . . Philosophy, they decided, was
not really useful. The important philosophical truths were obvious. . . .
‘I despise Philosophy, and renounce its guidance,’ cried Reid; ‘let my
soul dwell with Common Sense.’ ”34 What common sense taught,
among other things, was that the fundamental principles of ethics were
intuitively available to all, and that every human had the capacity to
act in accordance with those principles. Ordinary people had as much
moral wisdom and potential as any moral philosopher. Emerson
comments amply upon this ethical “egalitarianism”:
In every family of ordinary advantages in the middle ranks of life

the great questions of morality are discussed with freedom and
intelligence, introduced as matters of speculation but as having
foundations of certainty like any other science. In the lowest
orders of the people the occurrences of the day are debated, the
prudence or folly of politicians and private conduct examined,
and all with a reference to know the principles of ethical science.
Anciently, such views were confined to small circles of philoso-
phers. . . . This diffusion of the knowledge accumulated upon
these topics, although it does not multiply new terms of technical
value nor unfold delicate discoveries to the subtle metaphysician,
is yet the true and best interest of philosophy; for it marks the
boundary line of truth and speculation, it settles the foundations
of the science to be in the opinions of men, and thus confers the
only legitimate immortality upon its constitution and results. (EP
126–28)
What gives distinction to humans on the moral level is not, there-

fore, intellect or genius but what Emerson calls “worth,” a quality
inherent in the moral life (EP 118). Many personal qualities such
as intelligence and artistic talent are valuable, and their value is de-
termined externally (for instance, in the marketplace of ideas or of
aesthetic taste). Only the moral life has intrinsic value, that is, worth—
what the younger Seneca called dignitas (worthiness) as opposed to
pretium (price).35 The only aim ultimately appropriate to the moral life

35. Seneca, Epistulae Morales 71.33.
is, therefore, the intrinsic one of achieving maximum worth, that is,
approximating perfection (cf. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Fa-
ther which is in heaven is perfect”—Matthew 5:48). For Emerson, the
essential role of moral philosophy is to help humans advance toward
perfection: ethics is “a science whose very object is to perfect the nature
of man” (EP 130). Indeed, the achievement of human perfection will
mean the demise of ethics as a philosophical discipline: “Should these
eras of perfection which imagination anticipates arrive, we must cease
to speculate with any reference to the progress of science; if science
can sustain such an advancement, it must terminate here” (EP 131–
32). As Kant pointed out, moral imperatives can have relevance only
for imperfect rational beings, that is, for humans as they are presently
constituted. Humans would be unaware of moral imperatives if their
will and inclinations were not at variance with their sense of duty;
absolute congruence between them would obviate the very notion of
obligation.36
Since perfection is not yet, Emerson recognizes the need for ad-
vances in moral philosophy. At this early stage, he believes that the
only hope for progress in ethics lies with “the school in which Reid
and Stewart have labored.” The Scottish Common Sense philosophers
made a fruitful start, but their “reasonings as yet want the neatness
and conclusiveness of a system” (EP 130, 122–23). “System” is not an
ideal one associates with the mature Emerson, but at this point he, like
his teachers and contemporaries, was convinced that any important
theoretical endeavor needed to be translated into systematic form.
Jonsen and Toulmin have shown that the ideal of system dominated
Western intellectual life in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth
century; Thomas McFarland has noted “the omnipresence of system”
well into the nineteenth century: “Always it was to system, to the
architectonic harmonizing of various elements, that thought bent its
energies.”37 By way of illustration from the field of ethics I might
point to the greatest work on the subject in mid-nineteenth-century
Germany, System der Ethik (1851) by Immanuel Hermann von Fichte,
son of a more famous father (Johann Gottlieb Fichte) who himself had
36. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:414.
37. Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry, 275–78; Thomas McFarland, Co-
leridge and the Pantheist Tradition, xxxix.
Beginnings 27
written Das System der Sittenlehre (The System of Ethics) half a century
earlier (1798). When calling for a true system of ethics, Emerson was
giving voice to a common aspiration of his day. He recognizes that “to
exhibit a system of morals, entire and in all its parts, requires a powerful
faculty of generalization.” The ultimate generalization in ethics is to
establish one universal principle to which every part of the discipline
can be systematically related. Emerson calls upon moral philosophers,
therefore, to “look no longer for many ultimate principles . . . [but to]
persevere in accurate classifications” (EP 108, 130). The hoped-for
outcome will be a “code of moral maxims” endowed with a systemic
authority that “no rational being will dispute” (EP 122, 130).
Until ethics reaches this point of “self-evidence,” it will remain a
discipline clouded by uncertainty. Emerson repeatedly draws atten-
tion to the present state of our ignorance. As already indicated, “we
cannot know” that God intends the greatest possible happiness for
His creatures. When Emerson asserts that the human is a free agent,
he adds, “at least to all the purposes of which we have any conception.”
More generally he states that “the end of all human inquiry is confess-
edly ignorance” (EP 116, 123). Since Plato, almost every great moral
philosopher has acknowledged the indefinability of key concepts and
other obstacles on the road to understanding. Kant opened the first
edition of his Critique of Pure Reason with the observation that it was the
peculiar fate of human reason to be impelled to ask questions that it
cannot answer.38 The resulting uncertainty, of course, is what has made
the history of thought exciting and fruitful. Emerson’s reason was also
impelled to ask questions to which it found no satisfactory answers.
But no matter how tentative, Emerson’s answers were responses to
questions he asked afresh, and that made them in his view superior
to any “answers” provided by predecessors. In ethics as in every other
field to which he directed his attention, Emerson endeavored to think
his own thoughts, and in so doing he enriched his intellectual heritage
rather than merely absorbing it.
38. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A vii.

2
Metaethics
E merson’s position as a moralist is more readily understood if

some important distinctions within ethics are kept in mind. The
basic distinction is that between normative ethics and metaethics. The
former accepts ethics as a given and attempts to relate it to human
life and conduct. As the name suggests, normative ethics intends to
provide guidance, and it does so in two areas: value and obligation.
“Value” covers such questions as: What is the nature of the good life?
What makes life meaningful, fulfilling, worth living? “Value” refers to
all those things that it is good to be.1 “Obligation” prescribes what one
should do, how one should act. It concerns the rightness or wrongness
of actions, the performance of duties. The rightness of an obligatory
action is determined either teleologically or deontologically. For tele-
ologists (also called consequentialists) an action is right if it aims
at or achieves a result regarded as desirable in itself. The result, in
other words, has priority in the determination of rightness. An exam-
ple would be utilitarianism, where the aimed-at result (“the greatest
happiness of the greatest number”) becomes the criterion by which the
rightness of an action is measured: rightness depends on the degree in
which the action is productive of happiness. Deontology (derived from
deon, neuter present participle of the Greek impersonal verb dei: “one
must”) rejects such consequentialism. It considers the rightness of an
action to depend on the action’s conforming to a purely intrinsic (that
is, without regarding consequences) standard or principle. In Kant’s
view, for instance, an action is right only if it conforms to the moral law,
whose obligatoriness is revealed to us in our awareness of the demands
1. Cf. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 79.
28
Metaethics 29
of duty. Kant’s uncompromising adherence to the deontological view

may be judged from his claim that for an action to be morally right
it is not sufficient that it be pflichtmäßig (“in accordance with duty,”
but possibly inspired also by other considerations, such as goals or
consequences): the action must be performed aus Pflicht (“for the sake
of duty,” “from a motive of duty”).2
Normative ethics takes ethics for granted and deals with its content
and relevance from within the field, so to speak. Metaethics, on the
other hand, deals with questions about ethics—questions concerning
such matters as the metaphysical and epistemological status of ethics,
the foundation of ethics, the meaning of ethical terms, the nature
of ethical judgments, and the justification of ethical claims. Whereas
normative ethics makes, in Bernard Williams’s words, “substantive
claims about what one should do, how one should live, what [is]
worthwhile,” metaethics “concern[s] itself with the status of those
claims.”3 Are such claims, for instance, susceptible to knowledge, and
if so, what is the nature of ethical knowledge? And do such claims
concern properties that are “objective,” that are ontologically real,
or does, say, “goodness” not exist apart from its being thought or
felt as such? Responding to a query of a fellow passenger during his
homeward voyage from Europe in 1833, Emerson confronted some
basic metaethical questions:
Yesterday I was asked what I mean by Morals. I reply that I cannot

define & care not to define. It is man’s business to observe & the
definition of Moral Nature must be the slow result of years, of
lives, of states perhaps of being. Yet in the morning watch on my
berth I thought that Morals is the science of the laws of human
action as respects right & wrong. Then I shall be asked—And what
is Right? Right is a conformity to the laws of nature as far as they
are known to the human mind.—These for the occasion but I
propound definitions with more than the reserve of the feeling
abovenamed—with more because my own conceptions are so
dim & vague. (JMN 4:86)
The present chapter will examine Emerson’s metaethics, and sub-

sequent chapters will treat the areas of normative ethics that were
2. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:397–99.

3. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 72.
most important to him. Needless to say, metaethics and normative
ethics are not entirely separable. In the above quotation, Emerson’s
“I cannot define & care not to define” reflects a metaethical assump-
tion that the ultimate questions concerning ethics are beyond hu-
man understanding, and this assumption has obvious implications for
Emerson’s normative ethics: the moral law we have to obey confronts
us on the level of the Reason (through the “moral sentiment”), not
on the level of the Understanding (empirically). Whereas the Under-
standing explains, the Reason—in its practical (moral) rather than its
theoretical (epistemological) function—commands with an authority
transcending explanation. Conversely, normative considerations can
affect metaethics. Emerson believes humans have the duty to increase
their knowledge. Hence (in the above quotation), all metaethical in-
definability notwithstanding, “It is man’s business to observe” and to
strive for definition. In fact, Emerson sometimes considers metaethics
a major concern of normative ethics, as when he suggests that man’s
highest duty is to “revere the law & study the foundation principles
of Morals” (JMN 2:137). Obligation extends here not only to revering
the moral law, which is purely a matter of normative ethics, but also to
such a metaethical pursuit as the study of “the foundation principles of
Morals.” Emerson believes that the diligent study of such metaethical
problems will provide some answers. Although “morals [moral laws]
do not change . . . the science of morals does advance; men discover
truths & relations of which they were before ignorant; therefore, there
are discoveries in morals” (JMN 3:61).
Emerson’s metaethical efforts were directed primarily toward estab-

lishing the autonomy of ethics vis-à-vis religion and toward defin-
ing the relations between ethics and nature and between ethics and
knowledge. In addressing himself to the connection of religion and
ethics, Emerson responded to a problem that had become increasingly
troublesome in the century before him. The eighteenth century is
rightly called the golden age of moral philosophy, an age in which
a host of thinkers confronted afresh important questions in ethics
and which witnessed such signal achievements in the field as those
Metaethics 31
of Butler, Price, Hume, Kant, and Fichte. But as Laurence Lockridge

points out, “the deepest motive for the eighteenth-century absorption
in moral philosophy is the growing anxiety about the legitimacy of
theological sanctions.” When increasing doubt called into question
the religious bases of ethics, humans confronted a universe in danger
of becoming valueless and morally indifferent. Hence the desire for a
“Morality [that] might be built up on its own foundation.” This search
for an “independent” ethic or, in Lockridge’s words, “this pursuit of
the ethical as a counter-measure to the waning of faith,” lost none of
its urgency when the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic Age.4
These developments affected America no less than they did Europe.
As Daniel Howe comments, “moral philosophy was, in a sense, the suc-
cessor of theology. The prominence of moral philosophy in antebel-
lum American education apparently reflected a desire to supplement
religious sanctions with natural bases for values.” In New England
there occurred “a change in man’s very attitude toward theology. The
emphasis on ethics rather than dogma, which the eighteenth-century
Liberals pioneered, was one of the mainstays of nineteenth-century
Unitarianism.” Indeed, the Unitarians insisted that “dogma was sub-
ordinate to ethics.”5
In his early theorizing on the subject, Emerson at times considered
ethics to be a personal God’s gift to humankind. In “The Present State
of Ethical Philosophy,” human duties are held to derive from “the will
of the Creator as expressed in the constitution of the world, and in reve-
lation” (EP 116). Although Emerson might have sounded a little more
like a Christian and a little less like an exponent of natural religion if he
had put “revelation” ahead of “constitution of the world,” the Christian
orthodoxy of his view is not actually impaired by his not limiting
God’s expression of His will to revelation. Emerson is simply voicing
the traditional “Two Books” concept, which for centuries was a com-
monplace among Christian theologians, philosophers, and poets.6 To
quote one of Emerson’s favorite authors, Sir Thomas Browne: “There
are two bookes from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written
one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and publik
4. Laurence S. Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism, 21.

5. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 3, 7, 100.
6. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 319–23.
Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all.” Cotton Mather,
invoking the authority of the fourth-century St. John Chrysostom,
expressed the same view in his preface to The Christian Philosopher.
In the twelfth century the severely orthodox St. Bernard of Clairvaux
put the matter most tersely, declaring unhesitatingly that Natura Codex
est Dei (Nature is the Book of God).7 Emerson was, therefore, on solid
Christian ground when he found in nature the same personal God that
he found in the Bible, and it was the personal God thus twice revealed
that at this stage he considered “the Founder of the Moral Law” (JMN
2:5). Indeed, the moral law owes its existence to “the eternal character
of the Deity”; it derives “from a Mind, of which it is the essence. That
Mind is God” (JMN 2:49). Why should one obey the law of God?
Emerson gives a classic Christian answer:
You are not your own, but belong to another by the right of
Creation. This claim is the most simple, perfect, and absolute
of all claims. . . . God is [man’s] Maker and made those very
rights which he possesses. . . . Hence, the first ground of moral
obligation consists in this, that, the Being who ordained it, is
the Source, the Support, & the Principle of our existence. (JMN
2:121–22)8
This kind of derivation of the moral law from God ultimately proved
unacceptable to Emerson’s developing thought for three reasons: (1) it
conveyed the moral law “externally” (through revelation or the book of
nature); hence (2), it conveyed the moral law empirically (through the
senses and the understanding) rather than transcendentally; (3) it pre-
supposed a personal God, a God having such attributes of personality
as law-giving, and a God thus conceived became increasingly prob-
lematic for Emerson. The mature Emerson ceased regarding dogmatic
religion as a source of ethics. Foundationally, dogmatic religion and
ethics seemed to him incompatible. As we learn from Nature (1836),
“Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human
7. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Works, 1:24–25; Cotton Mather, The Chris-
tian Philosopher, 17–18; St. Bernard is quoted in Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century
Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period, 42.
8. Emerson’s reasoning on this point is identical with John Calvin’s. See Eric Mur-
phy Selinger, “ ‘Too Pathetic, Too Pitiable’: Emerson’s Lessons in Love’s Philosophy,”
177n36.
Metaethics 33
duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes
the personality of God; Ethics does not” (CW 1: 35). It is noteworthy
that in this passage Emerson has virtually translated religion into
ethics: both are now a “system of human duties,” and nothing more.
Emerson does not mean to privilege the religious system over the
purely ethical one by grounding the former in a personal God. By
the mid-1830s he had come to regard the attribution of personality
to God as misguided anthropomorphism and as conducive to idol-
atry (JMN 5:38, 467), and he had, after some hesitation, embraced
pantheism.9
Several years before Nature, Emerson had already reversed the pri-
ority involving religion and ethics. Far from ethics needing religious
sanction and definition, religion appeared increasingly to Emerson to
derive its value from the degree to which it became ethics. From an
1833 journal entry we learn that Christianity “rests in the broad basis
of man’s moral nature & is not itself that basis” (JMN 4:92). A year later
Emerson wrote that “Spiritual Religion . . . simply describes the laws
of moral nature as the naturalist does physical laws” (JMN 4:364). The
primacy or, to quote from the title of one of Emerson’s lectures, “the
sovereignty” of ethics remained a vital principle in his mature thought,
acting as a solvent of religious dogma—as is obvious, for instance, in
the Divinity School “Address” (1838). He continued to insist that “the
progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals” (W 10:208).
He often expressed himself on this subject fervently, as when he ex-
claimed in a late lecture called “The Preacher”: “Anything but unbelief,
anything but losing hold of the moral intuitions, as betrayed in the
clinging to a form of devotion or a theological dogma” (W 10:229). By
1859 he expected that religious formalism and dogma would soon be a
thing of the past, both locally and universally. He called Unitarianism
“a mere spec of whitewash, because the mind of our culture has already
left it behind,” and he saw Unitarianism’s loss of vitality as occurring
within a larger context of religious decline brought on by a more
deeply experienced morality: “Nobody . . . longer holds the Christian
traditions. We rest on the moral nature, & the whole world shortly
must” (JMN 14:283).
9. For the sources and characteristics of Emerson’s pantheism, see my Emerson’s

Modernity and the Example of Goethe, 28–30, 38–40.
Emerson’s grand alternative to God and religion as foundations
of ethics is, of course, the moral sentiment, which dispenses with
any external or empirically derived authority. In his early thought
Emerson did regard the moral sentiment as itself something with
which a personal God had endowed the human soul, but the inward
and ideal nature of this endowment proved so completely absorbing
to Emerson’s intellect that God’s role inevitably attenuated even before
God’s personality dissolved into Emerson’s pantheistic One-in-All. As
early as 1822 Emerson spelled out some basic characteristics of the
moral sentiment:
This Sentiment which we bear within us, is so subtle and unearthly

in its nature, so entirely distinct from all sense and matter, and
thence so difficult to be examined, and withal so decisive and
invariable in its dictates—that it clearly partakes of another world
than this. . . . This Sentiment differs from the affections of the
heart and from the faculties of the mind. . . . And the golden
rules which are the foundation of its judgements we feel and
acknowledge, but do not understand. (JMN 2:49–50)
Emerson here recognizes not only that the moral sentiment is absolute
in its authority, but also that it is a sentiment sui generis: it cannot
be understood or explained through analogy with such categories
as “affections of the heart” and “faculties of the mind.” In the fol-
lowing years and decades Emerson devoted much effort, conceptual
and rhetorical, to elucidation of the moral sentiment. For reasons to
be examined later in this chapter, he was bound never to succeed
completely; but although he failed in definition, he did provide a
considerable amount of descriptive material that significantly enriches
the reader’s appreciation of the moral sentiment.
A primary concern of Emerson’s was to establish the universal
authority of the moral sentiment, or what amounts to the same thing,
the universality of the moral law. He was convinced that the moral law
would command real respect and authority only if it were perceived to
be normatively universal. If the moral law were not universal, it would
emerge in human consciousness only as a congeries of subjective,
relativistic, and inconsistent ethical judgments. In fact, it would cease
to be a law at all: for Emerson, as for many other moral thinkers,
the very concept of “law” implies universal applicability, in ethics
Metaethics 35
just as much as in physics.10 Emerson asserted the universality of the

moral law by making ethics part—the essential part—of the nature
of things. He equated ethics with Being. As Evelyn Barish points out,
from his early years he cherished a phrase borrowed from his aunt Mary
Moody Emerson, “Morals [are] coeval with existence.”11 For Emerson
the structure of the universe is moral, “all things are moral.” The moral
law “lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference”
(CW 1:25–26). Attributing “self-existent excellence” to the moral law
and calling it the “causing force” and the “supreme nature which lurks
within all,” Emerson expresses a fundamental principle first articulated
by Plato in the Phaedo and in Book Six of the Republic, namely, that the
moral law, or as Plato’s Socrates phrases it, “the good and the ought”
(to agathon kai deon), is the essence (in the various philosophical
meanings of this term) of reality (CS 2:8; CW 1:182).12
Morality is consequently also the essence of human nature. Emer-
son considers morality the defining characteristic of our humanity. To
be human means to be morally implicated. Wanting to emphasize
this point, he almost rivals Cotton Mather in the use of italics: “The
perception of right and wrong, the perception of duty [is the] part of our
nature [that] is the sovereign part. It is the distinctive part. He that had
it not, would not be man” (CS 2:30). “Perception” is an important term
here in that it points, as we saw in chapter 1, to the objective status of
the moral law, a status already implied by the moral law’s universality.
Although accessible only through individual consciousness, the moral
law is not therefore its product. As an idealist Emerson remained, also
in ethics, an objective idealist (like Schelling and Hegel, for instance):
the moral law has ideal self-existence; it has (like Platonic Ideas) ontic
reality.13 Urging self-trust in a lecture on ethics, Emerson therefore
stresses that self-trust is “not a faith in man’s own whim or conceit as
if he . . . acted on his own private account, but a perception that the
mind common to the Universe is disclosed to the individual through
his own nature” (EL 2:151). Human nature, as Emerson never tires of
10. For a detailed discussion and evaluation of this principle in ethics, see Reiner
Wimmer, Universalisierung in der Ethik.
11. Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy, 101.
12. Plato, Phaedo 99C; A. E. Taylor, Plato, 287–89.
13. For the distinction between objective and subjective idealism, see Vittorio Hösle,
Die Krise der Gegenwart und die Verantwortung der Philosophie, 46–47, 205–13.
insisting, is the actualization of Soul, Mind, or Universe in self. This
is worth remembering when one reads statements like “Conscience—
Virtue . . . have . . . their foundation in the nature of man,” or “Ethics
result . . . from [man’s] constitution” (JMN 3:68; 12:57), or some of
the more extreme assertions in “Self-Reliance.” Emerson never lost
sight of what he considered the essential fact: “There exists a Universal
Mind which imparts this perception of duty” (JMN 15:470).
Emerson comments on the moral sentiment most informatively in
the Divinity School “Address.” His key statement is philosophically
revealing: “The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the
perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They
are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance” (CW
1:77). As a cognitive faculty, the moral sentiment clearly belongs with
the Reason rather than the Understanding. Insight is gained through
intuition, not through sense perception or ratiocination. Having no
phenomenal existence (“out of time, out of space”), the moral law
(“the laws of the soul”) is not accessible empirically and provides
no data for analysis. Transcending all experience (a point Emerson
repeats when he says that the moral law is “not subject to circum-
stance”), the moral law can be grasped only transcendentally. The
moral sentiment intuits the moral law as absolute (it has “perfection”)
and autonomous, in the strict sense of “self-legislative”: there is no
higher law, and there is no agent or causality external to the law
(“these laws execute themselves”). The moral sentiment apprehends
this “self-execution” of the moral law as conscience. Just as the Uni-
tarians identified conscience with the moral sense,14 Emerson iden-
tifies conscience with the moral sentiment. Emersonian conscience,
therefore, is not grounded in culture, experience, or psychology, but
in one’s transcendental self: “In the soul of man there is a justice
whose retributions are instant and entire” (CW 1:77–78). The very
absoluteness and immediacy (in the sense of “unmediatedness”) of
this justice defy discursive analysis. The moral sentiment/conscience
simply is as a constitutive fact of our humanness.
A related metaethical issue concerns the status of the Good. As a
pantheist, the mature Emerson was ipso facto a monist, and he there-
fore emphatically rejected any theory granting evil a status equal to
14. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 54, 58, 59.

Metaethics 37
that of good. The Manichaean view, for instance, which held that evil is
an independent, absolute principle opposed to the good, represented
the kind of metaphysical dualism that Emerson found unacceptable.
He regarded absolute evil or essential evil as a self-contradictory con-
cept. Evil as such cannot be: “That pure malignity exists, is an absurd
proposition” (JMN 5:266; 8:183). Emerson instead interpreted evil as
privation, a view first given prominence by Plotinus, for whom evil was
absolute want (penia pantelēs), the complete absence of good (apousia
agathou), the total privation (sterēsis) of Being.15 Plotinus was thus able
to maintain his doctrine of the One from which all things emanate
without weakening its monistic character and without making the
One the source of evil. Regarding the One, Being, and the Good as
synonymous, Plotinus insisted that since evil is the nonexistence of
the Good, evil is non-Being, nonentity. This doctrine proved attractive
to anyone wanting to deny evil the status of ultimate principle, whether
to avoid dualism or for other reasons. St. Augustine, for instance,
considered the will as such to be good, and he interpreted moral
evil as “a privation of right order” in the will. Frederick Copleston
comments:
This doctrine of evil as a privation was the doctrine of Plotinus,

and in it Augustine found the answer to the Manichees. For if evil
is a privation and not a positive thing, one is no longer faced with
the choice of either ascribing moral evil to the good Creator or
of inventing an ultimate evil principle responsible for evil. This
doctrine was adopted by the Scholastics generally from Augustine
and finds adherents among several modern philosophers of note,
Leibniz, for example.16
Emerson also was a modern exponent of this originally Plotinian

doctrine. His view that “the world is not the product of manifold
power, but of one will, of one mind” made it inevitable that he
should have regarded “whatever opposes that will” not as a positive
principle but as the very absence of such a principle: only “Good
is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute. . . . All evil is . . .
nonentity. Benevolence [Latin benevolentia: ”good-will”] is absolute and
15. Plotinus, Enneads 1.8.3; 1.8.11.

16. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, pt. 1:100.
real” (CW 1: 78). For Emerson, in brief, “Goodness & Being are one”
(JMN 8:183).
This doctrine helps explain one of Emerson’s most striking metaeth-
ical statements—a statement that Barbara Packer has described as
“surely one of the more audacious gestures in American literature”:17
We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. . . . It is

an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of
crime as lightly as they think. . . . The act looks very differently
on the inside, and on the outside. . . . Murder . . . is an act quite
easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns out to be a
horrible jangle and confounding of all relations. . . . For there is
no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian. . . .
It leaves out praise and blame, and all weak emotions. . . . Saints
are sad, because they behold sin, (even when they speculate,)
from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect;
a confusion of thought. Sin seen from the thought, is a diminution
or less: seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The
intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The
conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not: it
has an objective existence, but no subjective. (CW 3:45)
Throughout this passage the implicit identification of Being or essence

with subject and of subject with thought (intellect) entails the relega-
tion of evil to a realm that is accessible only empirically—the world
of phenomena, of others, of our own emotional and psychological
states; a world, in sum, that is in Emerson’s view epistemologically,
and therefore ontologically, less real than the world of ideal subjec-
tivity. Evil partakes of the reality of that less real world—the world
in which we “speak,” in which acts are perceived (“on the outside”)
and have frightening consequences (“horrible jangle and confounding
of all relations”), in which society’s laws prevail and its judgments
(“praise and blame”) affect us through our “weak emotions.” None
of these things, however—as we also learn from Emerson’s poem
“Brahma” (W 9:195)—has essential reality. To the intellect, there is
no crime or law (it is “hypernomian”); the intellect names evil “no
essence.” The saints are confused when they allow their emotions
(“conscience,” “will”) concerning evil to shape their thoughts (“when
17. B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays, 175.
Metaethics 39
they speculate”) on the subject. The conscience feels evil “as essence”;
however, there is no “essential evil.” Evil, in sum, “has an objective
existence, but no subjective.” Both “objective” and “subjective” in the
last sentence may be somewhat misleading to present-day readers. By
“objective” existence Emerson means that, to the subject, evil is phe-
nomenal and experiential, and thus not part of the subject’s essence.
Since he associates subject with Being or essence, he obviously intends
“subjective” here to mean “essential”—a meaning of the term sup-
ported by the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition) and attested
by examples from the seventeenth through the end of the nineteenth
century. The OED’s second definition of “subjective” provides a helpful
gloss indeed on Emerson’s use of the term: “Pertaining to the subject
as to that in which attributes inhere; inherent; hence, pertaining to the
essence or reality of a thing; real, essential.” Emerson has often been
criticized for his supposedly superficial sense of evil. As I hope to have
shown, his convictions concerning the status of evil were an integral
part of a complex and well-considered metaethical argument.18
II
The editors of Emerson’s Early Lectures suggest that his interest in

natural science in the early 1830s was “perhaps the principal agent in
his shift from a theological to a secular base for his moral philosophy”
(EL 1:1). Whereas religion confronted Emerson with doctrines and
forms that he had come to regard as local and temporal, as historically
and culturally specific, nature appeared to be the material represen-
tation of that universality which he regarded as a sine qua non for
the validity of the moral law. For Emerson the idealist, mind does not
conform to nature, but nature conforms to mind—a view obviously re-
flecting Kant’s Copernican revolution in epistemology. Nature as such
does not, however, conform to any finite mind, but to what Emerson
variously calls Mind, Soul, or Spirit. Not having risen to consciousness
(yet), Nature is, pantheistically speaking, God objectified, whereas
the human mind, though limited by individuality, is God achieving
18. For an important different interpretation of the passage discussed in this para-
graph, see Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 67–68.
(limited) self-awareness. In nature the human individual encounters,
therefore, his or her potential universality objectified; nature thus
suggests to the individual the need to realize in consciousness the
universality that is Spirit: “The world . . . is a remoter and inferior
incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. . . . Its
serene order is inviolable by us. It is therefore, to us, the present
expositor of the divine mind” (CW 1:38–39).
Nature’s “serene order” is but another name for its lawfulness.
Because of its inescapable lawfulness, nature can figure for Emerson as
a type of the absoluteness of the moral law as perceived by the moral
sentiment. Studying nature, consequently, amounts to studying one’s
own moral nature: “I would learn the law of the diffraction of a ray
because when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new
truth in ethics” (JMN 4:322). Emerson here expresses a generally Ro-
mantic position of profound epistemological and moral significance.
In the Hegelian view, for instance, “natural science is implicitly the
effort of consciousness to discover itself in Nature.”19 Emerson agreed:
since “the laws of nature preexisted in [the] mind” (EL 2:221), and
since we can, therefore, ultimately encounter only ourselves in nature,
he concluded that “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern
precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (CW 1:55). In
this context, Hegel’s claim that the best possible elucidation of the
freedom of the will is provided by the law of gravity makes perfect
sense. Freedom “is just as fundamental a determinant of the will
(Grundbestimmung des Willens) as gravity is a fundamental determinant
of bodies (Grundbestimmung der Körper).” Gravity is a necessary, not an
accidental, predicate of bodies; similarly, freedom is a necessary, not
an accidental, predicate of the will. Just as to the modern student of
nature bodies without gravity are inconceivable, so is (to Hegel and
many moderns) a will without freedom “a meaningless term” (ein
leeres Wort).20 Emerson relished the fact that freedom is “necessary”—
as necessary as gravity: “We are made of contradictions,—our freedom
is necessary” (JMN 9:335; also 11:76, 161). Or as he puts it in “Fate”:
One cannot “blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction,—freedom
is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and
19. G. R. G. Mure, The Philosophy of Hegel, 153n1.

20. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke, 7:46.
Metaethics 41
say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man”
(W 6:23). In sum, the lawfulness of the physical universe illustrates
ethical freedom, which is “the law of moral agents in the universe”
(EL 2:201; emphasis added). Or as Emerson put it more generally,
echoing Mme. de Staël, “The axioms of physics translate the laws of
ethics” (CW 1:21, 249).
Nature is not mere law, however. It is, in Kant’s formulation, “the ex-
istence of things as determined by universal laws.”21 It is phenomena—
sensuous objects—governed by law, and these provided Emerson with
an inexhaustible source of symbols for specific moral truths. As he said
in a sermon of 1832, “it is moral nature, which affords the key by which
the works of nature are to be read. They seem all to be hieroglyphicks
containing a meaning which only that can decipher” (CS 4:144). The
editors of the Early Lectures remind us that the tendency to interpret
natural objects as symbols of moral truth characterized Emerson’s
thought to the end of his intellectually active life (EL 1:3). He regarded
the moral law as “the pith and marrow of every substance, every
relation, and every process” (CW: 1:26), and he insisted that only
the symbolic imagination can detect the moral law within the natural
fact. Read symbolically, natural facts provide moral enlightenment:
“The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount
of truth which it illustrates to him” (CW 1:26).
III
Emerson endeavored to clarify not only the relation of ethics to nature,

but also that of ethics to knowledge. Early in his career, he some-
times adopted the Greek view and made morality dependent upon
knowledge. In the manner of Socrates, whom in a sermon he called
“the wisest certainly of all the pagans that preceded our Saviour,”
Emerson equated wickedness with ignorance and traced all fraud,
pride, selfishness, and envy to “false views of our nature and interest”
(CS 1:192, 79, 128, 163, 199). As might be expected, he paraphrased
the Socratic position at considerable length in his chapter on Plato in
21. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:437; Kritik
der praktischen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:43.
Representative Men (CW 4:36, 41, 47). But when in his mature years
Emerson, speaking in his own name, sometimes made moral progress
contingent upon deeper insight, he did little more than express the
obvious point that more advanced knowledge of what is right refines
one’s sense of moral obligation. Put bluntly, Emerson but restated
the commonsensical notion that one cannot experience as a moral
obligation something one does not or cannot know to be a moral
obligation.
Very early, Emerson began to move to another view of the relation
between ethics and knowledge—a view best described as Kantian.
Since Kant plays a significant part in the argument of this book, the
availability (in more than one sense) of his thought to Emerson needs
to be considered. Scholars have argued at length about the extent
of Emerson’s knowledge of Kant’s works, the quality of his sources
of information on Kant, and the degree to which he understood
Kant. David Van Leer, in addition to making his own contribution
to the debate, has provided a helpful survey of the scholarship on
the subject.22 It is unlikely that the argument concerning Emerson’s
indebtedness to Kant will become any less inconclusive than it is at
present. As Van Leer points out, “there is no way of proving the two
facts that would be most revealing—that Emerson did not read a text
or that he did understand it.” For Van Leer, what really matters is not
Emerson’s knowledge of or familiarity with Kantian concepts, but his
understanding of them; “for questions of understanding,” Van Leer
concludes, “any study of the genesis of thought is irrelevant.” The study
of Emerson’s Kantian sources is “a lost cause” since it cannot “address
the real issue of Emerson’s philosophical understanding.”23
This conclusion seems unduly categorical. There may, indeed, be no
way of proving that Emerson understood Kantian philosophy, but is
Kant for that reason irrelevant to him? If evidence of real understand-
ing were a prerequisite for discussion, would one be able to discuss
any thinker’s Kantianism? Who, after all, has understood Kant? Fichte
would have us believe that not even Kant understood Kant. Exegesis of
Kant has been a staple of philosophical scholarship for two centuries,
and there is no consensus anywhere in sight. Any student of, say, the
22. David Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays, 2–8, 209–13.
23. Ibid., 6.
Metaethics 43
Kritik der reinen Vernunft is likely to be baffled by a text in which “there

is hardly a technical term which is not employed . . . in a variety of
different and conflicting senses.” If Kant scholars are unable to con-
vince each other of the “correctness” of their respective understandings
of Kant, such “correct” understanding is certainly not to be looked
for among creative interpreters like Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson.
But the absence of such understanding does not make these writers’
responses to Kant’s thought irrelevant to our efforts to understand
them. Coleridge’s maxim is to the point: “Until you understand a
writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”24
A more fruitful approach to the question of Kant’s significance for
Emerson is suggested by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate in
their edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: “Kant, as the founder
and central figure of the critical philosophy, touched almost every
important intellectual topic of the period. Coleridge could not—nor
could anyone else—take up issues and ideas raised and introduced by
the new philosophy without everywhere encountering Kant.”25 When
Emerson examined the mind’s constitutive role in our experience
of the world, when he confronted the mind’s epistemic limitations,
when he struggled with the threat of solipsistic idealism, when he
had the sense of living in two worlds—the ideal and the actual—that
often seemed unrelatable to each other, he was responding, however
indirectly, to problems that, for his day, had been defined above all
by Kant. Kant’s importance to our understanding of Emerson is not
limited, therefore, to what can be shown—on the basis of external
or internal evidence—to have been Emerson’s firsthand knowledge
of Kant. Emerson also exemplifies Kantian positions without always
being aware of their specific Kantianism; or sometimes he may not
have made his awareness explicit. In such cases, Emerson’s ideas often
gain focus and clarity when read in the light of theoretical insights or
interpretive analogues provided by Kant.26
24. Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland,
Sämtliche Schriften, 3:608. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of
Pure Reason,” xx. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:232.
25. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:cxxv.
26. Excellent illustrations of this approach to Emerson’s Kantianism are Stanley
Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” The Senses of Walden, 123–38, and “Emerson, Coleridge,
Kant,” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, 27–49.
Emerson’s introduction to Kant came as early as 1822, apparently
through Dugald Stewart (L 7:118). Reading Stewart on Kant is now
a rather painful experience, but his self-confessed inadequacies as an
interpreter of Kant and his exploitation of secondary sources without
much sense of their reliability or authoritativeness did not prevent his
making available, however rudimentarily, some basic Kantian notions
that made Emerson’s mind more readily receptive to Kantian ideas in
years to come. By means of quotations and linking commentary, Stew-
art referred to such ethically relevant matters as the world of freedom
versus the world of necessity and the problems involved in the human’s
presence in either world; the practical reason’s supplementing the
theoretical reason’s inadequacy in establishing such ideas as freedom,
God, and immortality; and the primacy of morality among human
concerns. As early as 1823, such Kantian theorizing began to bear fruit
in Emerson’s own moral thinking, as evidenced, for instance, by JMN
2:82–83 (see below). Henry A. Pochmann recognized the essential
Kantianism of this passage, but having dismissed Stewart’s nearly thirty
pages as “incomparably bad as a commentary on Kant,” he failed at this
point to consider the Scot as an intermediary and was thus not quite
able to account for an Emersonian statement that, “when reduced
to essentials, will be recognized as Kant’s practical philosophy.”27 As
Emerson matured philosophically, Kant became increasingly impor-
tant to his ethics, and his encounters with Kantian thought became,
naturally, more complex and meaningful.
When considering the Kantian aspect of Emerson’s ethics, it is also
important to remember that the statement quoted from Engell and
Bate is as relevant to ethics as to epistemology. Kant accomplished
a “Copernican Revolution” in both fields. He was the greatest moral
philosopher of modern times—indeed, the greatest since antiquity.
He wrote, as Bernard Williams has concluded, “the most significant
work of moral philosophy after Aristotle” (Williams is referring to
the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785]—Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals). In the moral thought of Emerson’s day, Kant was
27. See Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary
Influences, 1600–1900, 86, 120, 159, 166; also Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy,
167–70; Dugald Stewart, Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and
Political Philosophy, in Collected Works, 1:408–10, 412.
Metaethics 45
preponderant and inescapable. The Harvard Unitarians worried about

the “moral tendency” of Kantianism, while Transcendentalists such as
Frederic Henry Hedge rejoiced in “the moral liberty proclaimed by
[Kant] as it had never been proclaimed by any before.” And no matter
how intrigued Emerson was by Kant’s contributions to epistemology,
he was primarily interested, as René Wellek has pointed out, in Kant’s
moral philosophy.28
At present I am concerned with Kant’s significance to Emerson’s
metaethical conception of the relationship between ethics and knowl-
edge. In Emerson’s view, this relationship involves three aspects, all
of them prominent in Kant’s moral theory: (1) the primacy of ethics
(or of the practical reason), (2) the cognitive function of the practical
reason, and (3) the inexplicability of the moral law.
As already indicated in chapter 1, Aristotle originated the distinction
between theoretical (or speculative) and practical reason and brought
ethics within the purview of the latter. This distinction—though not
necessarily the use to which Aristotle put it—was maintained by me-
dieval and modern philosophers.29 To cite a few authors known to
Emerson, Cudworth distinguished within “the understanding, both
speculative understanding, or the soul, as considering about the truth
and falsehood of things, and the practical, considering their good and
evil, or what is to be done and not done.” According to Hume, “Philos-
ophy is commonly divided into speculative and practical; . . . morality
is always comprehended under the latter division.” Reid insisted that
“to judge of what is true or false in speculative points, is the office of
speculative reason; and to judge of what is good or ill for us upon the
whole, is the office of practical reason.”30 Given this long-established
distinction, Emerson could in his first book simply refer to “Reason,
both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue” (CW
1:36) and assume that his readers needed no further explanation.
Kant is unique in the tenacity, depth, and detail of his inquiries into
the theoretical (speculative) and the practical reason. Putting matters
28. Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” 21–23, 179, 199.
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 55. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 79–81;
Frederic Henry Hedge, [“Coleridge”], 126. René Wellek, Confrontations, 193.
29. Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” 37.
30. Raphael, ed., British Moralists 1650–1800, 1:131 (Cudworth), 2:269 (Reid);
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 457.
as briefly as possible, one can say that whereas the first Critique (Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, 1781) was a critical examination and refutation of
the pretensions of the pure theoretical reason (its claims to metaphys-
ical knowledge), his second Critique (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,
1788) was a critical examination and refutation of the pretensions
of the empirical practical reason—and, per contra, a defense of the
absolutist claims of the pure practical reason. According to Kant, pure
reason, in its theoretical function, can give us no knowledge of the
objects that speculative metaphysics has traditionally claimed to be
able to give us knowledge of, since a basic ingredient of all theoreti-
cal knowledge—sensibility—is lacking. Since God, for example, tran-
scends all sensible experience, the theoretical reason, while enabling us
to think God, cannot enable us to know God, or even to know whether
there is a God. Like soul, freedom, immortality, holiness, and such,
God is an “Idea of the Reason,” to which nothing in our experience
can possibly correspond. This absolute transcendence, while depriving
us of knowledge of the objects of these Ideas, also guarantees that
the Ideas are indeed products of the Reason, since they could not
possibly have been suggested by our (nonexistent) experience of their
objects. But though not derived empirically, Ideas of the Reason are not
innate ideas. They are regulative or heuristic concepts inevitably arising
from the very nature of the Reason—from the Reason’s relentless drive
toward absoluteness, completeness, finality, and unity, the lack of
which leaves the Reason forever unsatisfied.31
In its practical function, on the other hand, pure reason rules
absolutely and universally. Pure practical reason is the a priori (that
is, nonempirical), unconditioned legislative faculty through which
humanity imposes the moral law upon itself. Only pure reason can be
the source of a formal (without specific, experience-derived content),
absolute, universally binding moral law. And since the moral law is
31. Kant often used “speculative reason” as synonymous with “theoretical reason,”
but he sometimes limited “speculative reason” to the metaphysical pursuits of the
theoretical reason (Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” 23–24;
Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 301n7). I see no point in maintaining
this distinction in a general discussion like the present, and I shall throughout use
“theoretical” since this term was clearly for Kant the more comprehensive one (see,
e.g., Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 634/B 662 ad fin.). Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft B
xxvi, A 327/B 383–84, A 323/B 380, A 327/B 384, A 642–68/B 670–96, A 670–71/B
698–99, A 797–98/B 825–26.
Metaethics 47
given to us qua rational beings by our own reason, we are, literally

speaking, autonomous. Our highest function as rational beings is to
obey the categorical commands of our own reason. All other sources
of the moral law Kant rejected as heteronomous: they put human
reason in the position of having to obey a law that it has not pre-
scribed to itself. Moreover, because such sources involve empirical
elements, their claims to universal validity must, by definition, be
disallowed. This is true even of God as source of the moral law.
Since we cannot know God (see above), every age fashions the God
best suited to its religious and intellectual resources and needs, as
for instance, in Kant’s day, the God “according to Crusius and other
theological moralists”—in other words, the anthropomorphized God
“experienced,” analyzed, and taught by eighteenth-century German
theological scholarship.32 Similar problems vitiate attempts to found
the moral law on nature, tradition, or society, all of which are accessible
only empirically. Kant is equally firm in his rejection of any source
involving subjective or affective—hence, again, empirical—elements,
such as our own “nature,” desires (as in philosophical hedonism), or
psychological makeup. Involving our experience (of our desires, for
instance), such sources are inherently limited and cannot possibly
originate a universally binding moral law.
Since one of Kant’s heteronomous targets was the moral sense (das
moralische Gefühl, nach Hutcheson),33 he would no doubt also have
rejected Emerson’s moral sentiment. He would have found Emerson,
at one and the same time, too empirical in his derivation of what is
morally right (“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. . . .
the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what
is against it”—CW 2:30) and too much of an intuitionist, a thinker
granting ontic reality to transcendent moral principles that reason
perceives but does not originate. But such fundamental differences
notwithstanding, Emerson, as I shall try to show, is often remarkably
Kantian in his views of the theoretical and the practical reason.
The dominant tradition in Western philosophy had identified the
highest form of the good life as the life of thought, of contemplation.
In this regard Kant, as Roger Sullivan has stressed, accomplished
32. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:40.

33. Ibid.
another Copernican revolution: He stood the traditional doctrine
on its head by insisting that moral practice . . . has supreme value.
It is “to be esteemed beyond comparison” as far more valu-
able than anything else, including theoretical understanding. . . .
Kant . . . argued that of itself theoretical activity is neither uncon-
ditionally nor intrinsically good; it is valuable only insofar as it
enhances moral practice . . . 34
The primacy of morality (the practical reason) over the theoretical

reason is a principle Emerson insists on over and over again, often
in terms strongly reminiscent of Kant. A few examples must suffice:
“Intellectual nature does not take the first rank in the scale of ex-
cellence. . . . Our understandings have an ultimate aim beyond their
own perfection—viz to be employed about moral excellence” (JMN
2:149). Or in a letter: “The moral is prior in God’s order to the
intellectual. . . . to the moral nature belongs sovereignty” (L 1:450).
Or as he put it in a sermon, “There are many faculties in the mind
but the highest faculty is the conscience” (CS 2:193). There is no
doubt whatsoever in Emerson’s mind that “the Moral Sentiment is
the highest in God’s order” or that “Ethics stand when wit fails” (JMN
5:362, 344). Explaining, in his splendid essay “Circles,” that there
are “degrees in idealism,” Emerson insists that in its highest form
idealism “shows itself ethical and practical” (CW 2: 183). Assertions
like these lend support to Cornel West’s claim that Emerson’s thought
“prefigures” such dominant characteristics of American pragmatism as
its “evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy,” its “unashamedly
moral emphasis,” and its “unequivocally ameliorative impulse.”35
34. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 97. For detailed discussion, see Sulli-
van, 95–113; also Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” 249–
50. David Jacobson’s fine argument in Emerson’s Pragmatic Vision: The Dance of the
Eye is somewhat marred by his persistent misreading of Kant’s position concerning
practical vs. theoretical reason and by his consequent misinterpretation of Emerson
as anti-Kantian in this respect. Jacobson refers to Emerson’s “dismissal of the Kantian
privileging of theoretical reason” (15); to Emerson’s “relegation of theoretical reason
to a secondary role,” thereby differentiating his thought “from Kant’s system” (33); to
Emerson’s “repudiat[ion of] Kant’s rationalism,” a repudiation involving his rejection
“of the limitation theoretical reason places on practical reason” and his liberating
“practical reason . . . from . . . the dominance of theoretical reason” (34; see also 60).
Since Kant himself asserted the primacy of the practical over the theoretical reason,
Emerson’s attitude on this point was hardly anti-Kantian.
35. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 9,
5, 4.
Metaethics 49
Kant also speaks of the pure practical reason as a superior cognitive

faculty. While the pure theoretical reason is incapable of providing us
with any knowledge of noumenal reality, we do have cognitive access
to that reality through the pure practical reason. We cannot know what
ultimately is, but we do know what ultimately ought to be done. Through
the absolute ought, that is, through the moral law, the practical reason
brings us face to face with a reality that owes nothing to the phe-
nomenal world. The ultimate Law does not originate in the world of
sensibilia or experience; it confronts us with an absolute fact of reason.
Pure practical reason is noumenal reality brought to our awareness as
absolute Law—as moral law, as imperative, as obligation.36
The pure practical reason extends its cognitive function by assuming
three postulates—God, freedom, and immortality—as necessary to the
proper functioning and ultimate efficacy of the moral law. From the
standpoint of practical reason, Kant insists, a postulate is a mode of
knowledge “not inferior in degree to any other knowledge (Wissen),
although in kind it is wholly different.” Again, none of these postu-
lates is an object of theoretical knowledge and hence none of them
is susceptible of proof (each is an Idea of the Reason), but the pure
practical reason conceives of them as implementally necessary to the
moral law. Take freedom, for example. Kant’s claim that we cannot
know what freedom is or know that we are free is amply supported by
the fact that the question of moral freedom (freedom of the will) has
been one of the most hotly debated issues in the history of Western
thought, with philosophers and theologians as often as not inclining
to the view that we are not free. Emerson rightly concluded that “it
is an old dispute which is not now and never will be totally at rest,
whether the human mind be or be not a free agent” (JMN 2:58).
But reason, Kant holds, would be inconceivably self-contradictory if it
were to impose upon itself—upon us as rational beings—commands
it could not possibly execute. Since reason “commands that such
[actions] should take place, it must be possible for them to take
place.” Our ability to obey the moral law, to act in accordance with the
commands of the pure practical reason, brings with it a consciousness
of freedom—freedom to act “rationally” and thereby freedom from
36. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:43.

habit, inclination, temptation, or any other empirical factor. Although
theoretically undefinable and unprovable, freedom enters our con-
sciousness, and this fact exemplifies once again the cognitive role of
the practical reason. In Roger Sullivan’s words, “the positive assurance
of our freedom rests epistemologically on the prior appearance in
our awareness of the Categorical Imperative and its more particular
commands.” Or as Kant himself puts it, “the moral law is the only
condition under which we can become aware of freedom.” Freedom
is inherent in the moral law. Without freedom the pure reason could
not be “practical,” that is, morally binding. Freedom thus becomes the
defining trait of humanity under the law of reason. For Kant, in sum,
freedom and morality are mutually implicative, as Dugald Stewart did
not fail to notice. Kant was, in Stewart’s words, “deeply impressed with
a conviction . . . that morality and the freedom of the human will must
stand or fall together.”37
Emerson often contrasts the epistemological limitations of the
theoretical reason (his theoretical skepticism) with the cognitive as-
surances provided by the practical reason. In the early journal pas-
sage Pochmann already recognized as essentially Kantian (see above),
Emerson, having duly appreciated the claims of theoretical skepticism,
concludes:
But it is in the constitution of the mind to rely with firmer

confidence upon the moral principle, and I reject at once the idea of
a delusion in this. This is woven vitally into the thinking substance
itself. . . . Upon the foundation of my moral sense, I ground my
faith in the immortality of the soul. (JMN 2:83)
This passage not only stresses the superior cognitive status of the moral
principle or the moral sense, but it also calls to mind one of Kant’s
postulates of the practical reason. Emerson often also regards the idea
of God as a product of the practical reason: “He who does good, in
the moment that he does good, has some idea of God,” or expressed
without qualification, “We form just conceptions of [God] by doing
37. Immanuel Kant, “Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientiren?” Gesammelte Schriften,
8:141. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 807/B 835. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral
Theory, 321n6; Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:4n. Stewart,
Dissertation, 1:410.
Metaethics 51
his will. Obedience is the eye that sees God” (CS: 3:52, 4:134). The
cognitive range of the practical reason is apparent when Emerson
claims that “Obedience is the eye which reads the laws of the Universe”
(JMN 3:269). In fact, “as [the] demands of duty are complied with the
soul is rewarded by a better knowledge” (CS 4:140). This knowledge is
also self-directed: it is through the moral sentiment that “the soul first
knows itself” (CW 1:79). In sum, “the moral sense is the proper keeper
of the doors of knowledge” (JMN 3:269). Emerson thus seems to have
reinterpreted St. Anselm of Canterbury’s famous credo ut intelligam
(“I believe so that I may understand”)38 along Kantian or “practical”
lines. Searching for some insight into the mystery of God, St. Anselm
regarded faith as a prerequisite for understanding: faith provided the
correct point of view, so to speak. Emerson’s prerequisite for insight, on
the other hand, is obedience to the moral law. For him it is morality
that provides the correct point of view: “Goodness is the right place
of the mind. . . . Man . . . must be set in the right place to see or the
order [of the whole] will become confusion to his microscopic optics”
(JMN 3:269). This morality-based epistemology informs Emerson’s
argument most strikingly in Nature, where “the redemption of the
soul” supplies the correct point of view. Without such redemption,
“the axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so
they appear not transparent but opake” (CW 1:43).
Like Kant, Emerson insists that freedom, the sine qua non of moral-
ity, is “known” through the practical, not the theoretical reason:
We know that we are free to all the purposes of moral account-

ability. . . . When we say that we are free we rest on a conviction
that is too mighty for reason and must stand whether reason can
sanction it or no. We feel in every action that we may forbear,
that we are unquestioned masters of our own purposes. . . . Our
whole worth depends upon our freedom. A man is respectable
only as far as his actions are his own. (CS 2:71)
By “reason” in this passage, Emerson obviously means the theoretical

reason. It is interesting to note that theoretical ignorance is actually
38. “Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam” (“I do not,
in fact, seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe so that I may
understand.”)—St. Anselm, Proslogion, Opera Omnia, 1:100.
a condition of the exercise of moral freedom. According to Kant,
metaphysical arrogance distorts the claims of the reason, in the process
weakening the legitimate demands of the pure practical reason and giv-
ing rise to every imaginable form of anti-moral, because dogmatically
binding, superstition or unbelief. Hence Kant’s famous claim that he
had to destroy knowledge (that is, metaphysical pseudo-knowledge)
in order to make room for faith (faith in such postulates of the practical
reason as God, immortality, and freedom).39 Coleridge adopted this
view: for him also, our acquisition of true metaphysical knowledge (if
such a thing were possible) would have destroyed our moral freedom.
He puts it best in a statement that Emerson seems to echo. Discussing
the existence of God, Coleridge writes: “It could not be intellectu-
ally more evident without becoming morally less effective; without
counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold
mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent.”40 Commenting
on immortality, Emerson writes in the same vein:
If a greater knowledge of the future state were given us, it would

destroy our freedom, and so make us incapable of virtue. . . . If the
mist of our ignorance should roll away . . . we should be bribed
to goodness. We should be frighted from crime. We should have
no choice in our action; no liberty; no virtue. (CS 2:178)
In addition to the primacy of the practical reason (or pure reason

in its practical function) and the cognitive role of the practical reason,
there is a third aspect to the relation of ethics to knowledge, namely,
the inexplicability of the moral law itself. In Kant’s view, to explain
anything is to bring it within the framework of the laws governing
phenomenal experience. What has no empirical reality for us is not
susceptible of explanation. Kant often refers to Ideas of the Reason
as “mere Ideas” precisely because they have no empirically accessi-
ble content and are, therefore, unknowable and inexplicable.41 As a
product of pure reason, the moral law is part of what Kant variously
calls the “noumenal” (as opposed to “phenomenal”), “intelligible” (as
39. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft B xxx.

40. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:203.
41. See, e.g., Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 328–29/B 384–85; Grundlegung zur Meta-
physik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:459.
Metaethics 53
opposed to “sensible”), or “thinkable” (as opposed to “knowable”)

world. Our actions in response to the moral law, like all actions, in-
evitably occur in the phenomenal world, but the law itself—absolute,
unconditioned, universally binding—not only is not derived from ex-
perience but transcends all possible experience and has, consequently,
no knowable content. We become aware of the law not as knowable
object but as absolute command, as moral obligation. The law is thus
for us a “practical,” not a “theoretical,” reality.
Emerson’s views reveal a similar combination of moral absoluteness
and theoretical agnosticism. Commenting upon the moral sentiment,
he declares: “An eternal, uniform necessity at the heart of being re-
quires ever the good act at the hands of each soul. The sentiment is
the ultimate fact, and cannot be defined. . . . It is the law of soul” (EL
2:345). In another discussion of the moral law, he tells his audience:
“You cannot conceive yourself as existing . . . absolved from this law
which you carry within you. It can’t be defined but it is understood
by us all” (CS 2:31). By “understood” Emerson obviously means
“familiar to us through our moral sense,” as opposed to “definable,”
that is, “subject to intellectual determination.” Emerson’s attitude here
resembles St. Augustine’s toward time: Augustine said that he was
aware of time but could not answer any questions concerning it.
In other words, he could not translate his experience of time into
theoretical statement.42 The law of ethics, Emerson writes elsewhere,
“cannot yet be stated, it is so simple” (EL 1:370)—so absolutely simple
(Latin simplex: uncompounded, one) as to be untranslatable into
predicates, inaccessible to analysis. Emerson’s connecting simplicity
with ineffability may be due in part to the influence of Mary Rotch, a
Quaker who made a deep impression on him in the early 1830s. As he
noted in his journal, Mary Rotch was spiritually guided by something
that was neither an “impression” nor an “intimation” nor an “oracle”:
“It was none of them. It was so simple it could hardly be spoken
of” (JMN 4:263).43 Theoretical unknowability is also in Emerson’s
mind when he draws his audience’s attention to the fact that moral
42. “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare
uelim, nescio” (“What, then, is time? When nobody asks me, I know; when I want to
explain it to someone asking me, I don’t know.”)—St. Augustine, Confessions 11.14 (17).
43. For an insightful discussion of Mary Rotch’s effect on Emerson, see Richardson,
Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 157–63.
problems such as “the origin of evil” and “human liberty” have baffled
thinkers through the ages; consequently, “it is fair to conclude that
here lies a great question, to settle which the human understanding
is perhaps inadequate” (CS 2:46). Through the moral sentiment, the
human confronts the ought—absolute as command but, we are told
once more, theoretically ungraspable: “He ought. He knows the sense
of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render account
of it” (CW 1:77). How the moral sentiment commands, “we pretend
not to define. . . . It passes understanding” (W 10:98). We only know
that it commands. For Emerson the moral law, in short, is the ens
realissimum (“most real being”). Its reality is unconditioned and self-
derived, and, while transcending our understanding, to us humans
inescapable.
Emerson’s most purely Kantian text on this subject is to be found
in his 1835 formulation of what he called “the First Philosophy”
(JMN 5:270–73)—a label intended to stress the intrinsic importance
of what he was trying to say (“First Philosophy” translates Aristotle’s
prōtē philosophia, Aristotle’s own term for what was later called his
metaphysics):44
By the First Philosophy, is meant the original laws of the mind. It

is the Science of what is, in distinction from what appears. It is one
mark of them that their enunciation awakens the feeling of the
Moral sublime. . . . These laws are Ideas of the Reason, and so are
obeyed easier than expressed. They astonish the Understanding
and seem to it gleams of a world in which we do not live. (JMN
5:270)
“Ideas of the Reason,” laws commanding obedience but defying articu-

lation and even understanding, part of a world transcending our expe-
rience but awakening “the feeling of the Moral sublime”—the Kantian
flavor is unmistakable.45 Emerson apparently owed his Kantian “Ideas
44. Emerson apparently derived the Aristotelian term, in its Latin form (prima
philosophia), through Francis Bacon (JMN 3:360). Aristotle, Bacon, and Emerson use
“first philosophy” in very different senses, but for all three the term designates what they
consider most important or most fundamental in human thought. It is also noteworthy
that the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, titled his philosophical masterpiece
Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641).
45. For Kant’s association of the moral law with the sublime (das Erhabene, die
Erhabenheit) see, e.g., Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften 5:85–89, 117.
Metaethics 55
of the Reason” to the mediation of Coleridge. A couple of months

before writing his “First Philosophy” statement, he remarked in his
journal: “I should be glad of a Catalogue of Ideas; objects of the
Reason, as Conceptions are objects of the Understanding. Mr. Co-
leridge names . . . God, Free will, Justice, Holiness, as Ideas in Morals”
(JMN 5:29). Emerson here not only revealed his awareness of the
Kantian distinction between Ideas of the Reason and Concepts of
the Understanding, but as the editors of the Journals indicate (JMN
5:29n86), he added “God” to Coleridge’s list of Ideas (which he found
in The Friend), thus making it all the more completely Kantian.
Daniel Howe notes that the Harvard Unitarians were deeply com-
mitted to belief in a personal and supernatural God, whose existence
they “proved” through the teleological argument (the argument from
design). Kant rejected all “proofs” of the existence of God—whether
ontological, cosmological, or physico-theological (as he called teleo-
logical)—and made God, as already indicated, a postulate of the
practical reason.46 “This,” Howe comments, “was too much for a Har-
vard Unitarian to swallow; God could not be a mere hypothesis.”47
Emerson apparently had no such theological qualms. He regarded
the attribution of personality to God as evidence of a confusion of
planes, that is, of an Idea of the Reason being reduced to the level
of sensibilia: “The Ideas of the Reason assume a new appearance as
they descend into the Understanding. Invested with space & time
they walk in masquerade. It [the Understanding] incarnates the Ideas
of Reason. Thus the gods of the ancient Greeks are all Ideas” (JMN
5:272; emphasis added). Similarly, “Heaven is the projection of the
Ideas of Reason on the plane of the Understanding” (JMN 5:273).
The Divinity School “Address” was Emerson’s strongest protest against
such a confusion of planes, which in his view resulted in Christianity
having become mythological, like “the poetic teaching of Greece and
of Egypt, before.” There is, simply, “no doctrine of the Reason which
will bear to be taught by the Understanding” (CW 1:81). Stripped
of anthropomorphic and other pictorial associations, the God of the
Divinity School “Address” is law, practically commanding but theo-
retically unknowable, accessible not through doctrine or dogma but
46. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 592/B 620-A 630/B 658.
47. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 76–80.
through the moral sentiment (CW 1:81). Emerson never abandoned
this conviction. As he put it in a late lecture, “The populace drag
down the gods to their own level. . . . God . . . [is] known only as pure
law. . . . Every nation is degraded by the goblins it worships instead
of this Deity” (W 10:104). Like Kant, Emerson wants to remove all
pseudo-knowledge of God; his pantheistic God is quite as much a
transcendent Idea as is the personal God postulated by the Kantian
practical reason and thus equally defies conceptualization. Emerson’s
pantheistic God arises in human consciousness first and foremost as
all-pervasive lawfulness.
Stephen Whicher remarked that Emerson’s was a mind “precipitated
into originality . . . by contact with ‘modern philosophy.’ ”48 Emerson’s
receptivity to Kantian ideas in ethics not only distinguished him from
his philosophically more conservative Unitarian contemporaries but
also was an important aspect of his creative engagement with modern
thought—an engagement that helped make him perhaps intellectually
the most fascinating figure in our literature.
48. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 181.

3
Self-Realization
W hereas on the metaethical level Emerson is an intuitionist,

on the level of normative ethics he espouses a position best
characterized as self-realizationism. In chapter 2, I pointed to the dis-
tinction between teleological and deontological theories in normative
ethics. Self-realizationism is most aptly described as a modified form
of teleological ethics. The basic similarity between self-realizationism
and standard teleological ethics consists in their both judging actions
in the light of ends to be achieved. They both regard the consequences
of an action—its promotion or realization of some good—as the
defining criterion of the action’s moral value. They are thus both at
variance with deontological ethics, which considers actions to be right
(or wrong) “in themselves,” that is, in the light of some absolutist
notion of duty or obligation. Still, there is a significant difference
between teleological and self-realizationist ethics. A teleological the-
ory presupposes a relatively clear sense of the end aimed at, whether
this be the eudaimonia of Aristotle, the apatheia of the Stoics, the
ataraxia (imperturbability) of Epicurus, or “the greatest happiness of
the greatest number” of Francis Hutcheson and the Utilitarians. Self-
realizationist ethics, while goal-directed by definition, is less certain
about the “content” of the goal because it lacks adequate knowledge
about the latent, yet-to-be-explored-and-developed “content” of the
self. In other words, in self-realizationist ethics humans are in search
of the self that they are duty-bound to realize, and they have, conse-
quently, no clear idea of the end to be achieved. Self-realization, to be
sure, is the end, but in view of the indeterminacy of the self before its
realization, this end is indefinite. It is also, obviously, an end forever
unattainable: no degree of self-realization can ever be assumed to have
57
realized the full potential of the self. This is all the more so since the
self is no objective substance but is constituted, to a significant degree,
by a process of self-interpretation and self-articulation, as Emerson
well understood: “The man is only half himself, the other half is
his expression” (CW 3:4). Such a process is unending: every self-
interpretation, every self-articulation adds to the self, constitutes a
new aspect of the self—which calls for further interpretation and new
attempts at articulation. Unendingly, “we study to utter our painful
secret” (CW 3:4).
Ethical labels often obscure more than they clarify, as a result of
either jargonistic excess (the current affliction) or lack of specificity.
Laurence Lockridge’s witty question highlights the former problem:
“Was Aristotle an act-utilitarian cognitivist non-definist, or something
worse?”1 The term “self-realizationism,” on the other hand, is defini-
tionally weak because it seems to lack specificity: students of ethics
have used it to designate the most varied ethical orientations. Broadly
speaking, one might claim that all ethics is concerned with human self-
realization, in the sense that all schools of ethics have been concerned
with promoting that which is “best” in and for us, and thus with
bringing our ideal human self-image, however defined, as close to
reality as possible. In this broad sense, Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics,
Thomas Aquinas, and Shaftesbury, to name but a few, are all self-
realizationists.
As my opening remarks suggest, I am using “self-realizationism”
in a narrower sense, limiting it to the ethical thought of those for
whom the very notion of “self” had become problematical. The first
thinkers fully to confront the crisis of the self were the post-Kantian
idealists and, in literature, the Romantics. It was not until the Ro-
mantic age, in other words, that self-realizationism truly came into its
own as an ethical theory. It then not only gained in definition and
depth but also acquired a special urgency. The impact of democratic
and egalitarian ideals, the growth of mass culture, the increasing
complexity and interdependence of modern life, urbanization and
industrialization, nascent socialism, and, on a more speculative level,
historicism—all contributed to what Emerson called the “fading” of
1. Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism, 139.

Self-Realization 59
“our pretension . . . of self-hood” (W 6:320). Reaction to these threats

to the integrity and viability of the self took various forms, such as
compensatory hero worship, the cult of the rebel, one-man reform like
Thoreau’s, cosmic self-assertion à la Whitman, or advocacy of a return
to nature in order to find one’s true self in solitude. Emerson’s anti-
historicist gesture is significant in this context. In his lecture series on
“The Philosophy of History,” as his editors point out, he “invert[ed] the
organic theories of the day to merge history into the individual rather
than to merge the individual into the process of history” (EL 2:3).
But the reaction that really concerns me here is the ethical one: self-
realizationism. Understanding its true significance requires a closer
look at the predicament of the self, as Emerson perceived it.
Most striking about Emerson’s treatment of questions concerning
the self, personal identity, the “I—this thought which is called I” (CW
1:204), is the frequency with which he confesses that they pass all
understanding. He gave all but aphoristic expression to his sense of
the mystery of the self in an 1837 journal entry: “Hard as it is to describe
God, it is harder to describe the Individual” (JMN 5:337). Emerson’s
eloquence about the importance, the supremacy, the centrality of the
self is matched by an equally eloquent skepticism, as when he calls the
self the human’s “Unknown Centre” or considers the self to be rooted
in “that Fact which cannot be spoken, or defined, nor even thought.”
And yet, as every reader of Emerson knows, this unknown self is the
source of all moral empowerment. From it “follows easily [man’s]
whole ethics. . . . The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained”
(CW 1:203–4). In “The American Scholar,” Emerson emphasizes the
supreme duty of self-trust, which he considers the source of all virtues
(CW 1:63). But why should we trust the self? “For this self-trust,
the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,—darker than can be
enlightened” (CW 1:65).
This imbalance between the richness of moral self-reference and
the poverty of self-knowledge is a characteristic Emerson’s thought
shared with that of many of his contemporaries. It is traceable to that
radical desubstantialization of the self in eighteenth-century thought,
for which Hume and Kant were chiefly responsible. Hume denied
substance to the self and considered personal identity a mental fiction.
“There are some philosophers,” Hume writes, “who imagine we are
every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that
we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain,
beyond the evidence of demonstration, both of its perfect identity and
simplicity.” However, he continues, “when I enter most intimately into
what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or
other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I
never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe any thing but the perception.” The question of identity is not,
therefore, a relevant philosophical question at all. It is a linguistic or,
as Hume puts it, a “merely verbal” question. In sum, “all the nice and
subtile questions concerning personal identity . . . are to be regarded
rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.”2
Kant in his turn denied substance to the self. The “I” has no content.
It is not a subject of experience. It functions merely, Kant says, as “a
transcendental subject of the thoughts.” As such, it “equals X,” that is,
“this I, or he, or it (the thing) that thinks”—a statement that clearly an-
ticipates Nietzsche’s unsettling critique of the notion that the predicate
“think” presupposes “I” as subject. We become aware of this “I” only
through its predicates, that is, through our thoughts. We can never have
the least awareness of an “I” in isolation from the thoughts it thinks.
The “I” itself is no concept, but “a mere consciousness accompanying
all concepts” (ein bloßes Bewußtsein, das alle Begriffe begleitet). Kant calls
the a priori form or structure enabling the “I” to unify the manifold
of perception into an object of thought “the transcendental unity of
apperception” (die transscendentale Einheit der Apperception). In other
words, there can be no object of thought, no concept, without a
corresponding “objective unity of consciousness”—“unity,” because
only through what can be united in one consciousness can there be an
“I think” at all; “objective,” because, as H. J. Paton puts it, “the self-
consciousness of thinking is only a consciousness of the principles (or
conceptions) in accordance with which it functions.”3 Unlike Hume,
for whom the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different
perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity,
and are in a perpetual flux and movement,” Kant thus maintains the
2. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 251–52, 262.

3. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 345–46/B 404, B 139; Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut
und Böse § 17, Sämtliche Werke, 5: 31; H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study
in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, 237.
Self-Realization 61
unity of the subject. However, as already indicated, the Kantian “I

think” provides no insight into the “I” beyond pointing to its necessary
logical function. In sum, Kant emphasizes that even though my “I” is
a constant in all my thinking, it does not at all follow that my “I”
has independent existence or substance (daß ich als Object ein für mich
selbst bestehendes Wesen oder Substanz sei).4 On this last point, Kant is
in complete agreement with Hume.
Hume and Kant between them, Stanley Cavell suggests, shattered
all hope of success for Emerson’s (or, for that matter, any other Ro-
mantic’s) attempts at “a resubstantializing of the self.” Kant’s influ-
ence proved especially decisive. Chief, and most problematic, among
his legacies to Romanticism was precisely, in the words of Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, the “weakening of the sub-
ject,” the anguished response to which was perhaps best captured by
Teufelsdröckh’s “unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that
can say ‘I’?” Yet, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy also point out, the
Romantic “weakening of the subject is accompanied by an appar-
ently compensatory ‘promotion’ of the moral subject.” Here again, Kant
showed the way. According to Bernard Williams, “this transcendental
I, which is [merely] formal in the case of thought in general, is made
by Kant to do much more in relation to morality.”5 It is in the context
of morality that the “I” becomes truly a person.
Personhood is, however, a Kantian “Idea of the Reason,” and as
such it transcends all our experience and cannot, therefore, become
an object of theoretical knowledge. But although theoretically empty,
Ideas of the Reason, as we saw in chapter 2, have great regulative or
heuristic value, especially in relation to moral thought. As Roger Sulli-
van points out, “Since moral reasoning is concerned with the way we
ought to behave, our moral life is defined by a whole range of standards
or ideals or models of perfection, none of which is or can be found . . .
in the world of theoretical experience.”6 Personhood is such a standard
or ideal. Lewis White Beck (who prefers the term “personality”) puts
4. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 252; Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft B 407.
5. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, xii. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 30–31; Thomas
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 53. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 211n18.
6. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 18.
it thus: “Personality . . . is an Idea of reason, and personality is not a
given. We are persons, but no finite sensuous being is fully adequate to
the Idea of personality. In human nature, considered empirically, we
find at most only a ‘predisposition to personality.’ ” Although as an Idea
of the Reason personhood does not contribute to our theoretical self-
knowledge, it is, in Kant’s words, “necessary and sufficient to practical
[i.e., moral] use.” And as Beck concludes, this practical role leads to “a
richer conception of personality than that of the transcendental unity
of apperception.”7
This promotion of the “moral subject” characterizes the thought of
many of Kant’s successors. Fichte, centering his entire philosophical
system in the “absolute ego,” conceived of that ego as positing itself
through activity. The Fichtean ego is not a “being,” but an endless
striving toward self-realization through overcoming the non-ego, it-
self posited by the ego and constituting an “other,” “limitation,” or
“obstacle” that provides necessary scope for the ego’s self-realizationist
striving. The moral implications are obvious. Windelband summarizes
Fichte’s position thus: “The inmost essence of the ego . . . is its action,
directed only toward itself, determined only by itself,—the autonomy
of the ethical reason. . . . The I is the ethical will, and the world is the
material of duty put into sensuous form.” In a similar vein Coleridge
considered “the free-will” to be “our only absolute self”; as he told
Emerson when they met in 1833, “the will [is] that by which a person
is a person” (CW 5:6). Carlyle raised the moral self by reinterpreting
Kant’s pure reason as “the moral intuition of the world of eternal
values.” Emerson, in his turn, conceived of the self primarily in moral
terms. He is eloquent about self-trust, self-reliance, self-dependence,
and self-culture, but he has little to say about self-knowledge beyond
asserting that it is unattainable. In his search for a morally compe-
tent self he is even willing to accept foundations for it that some
of his predecessors had declared invalid. Hume, for instance, had
considered and rejected memory as a source of personal identity.8 But
7. Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” 227; Kant, Kritik der
reinen Vernunft A 365–66.
8. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 2:594. Coleridge, Biographia Liter-
aria, 1:114. For an erudite discussion of Coleridge’s “will” in the context of relevant
German thought from Böhme through Schelling, see McFarland, Coleridge and the
Self-Realization 63
for Emerson, “Memory . . . is the thread on which the beads of man

are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral
action” (W 12:90). He was, to the mind of his contemporaries, on
surer and philosophically more respectable ground when he claimed
that “man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and
understanding” (CW 4:70). He was as convinced as Coleridge that
“the will . . . is the seat of personality,” that “the will constitutes the
man” (CW 4:54; W 10:91).
Recognizing that the self is theoretically indefinable compounds
the problem of teleological indeterminacy that, as already indicated,
seems inescapable in self-realizationist ethics. Yet, since actions have
to be judged in the light of the end to be achieved, there is a need for
criteria beyond the obvious and indefinite one according to which an
action is right or wrong on the basis of its advancing or impeding the
self in its progress toward self-realization. Emerson the intuitionist
(metaethically speaking) perceives two absolute values inherent in
the transcendent Self: harmony and universality. For the individual,
subjective, empirical self, both are ideals—ultimately unattainable but
to be striven for—and criteria by which to judge actions. The individual
has to approximate, to the highest degree possible, the transcendent
entity that Emerson variously calls Self, Soul, Spirit, or God, and he or
she does so by striving for the harmony (which Emerson sometimes
also calls symmetry) and the universality that are constitutive of the
Self transcendentally conceived.9 Self-realization thus amounts to the
Pantheist Tradition, 328–30. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 65n4. Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature, 261–62.
9. It should be obvious by now that I am using “transcendent” and “transcendental”
in the loose Emersonian rather than the strict Kantian sense of these terms. Put as
simply as possible, Kant used transscendental to refer to knowledge concerned not with
objects, but with our mode of cognition of objects so far as this is possible a priori; he
used transscendent to designate cognitive principles (Grundsätze) directed (fruitlessly)
to what lies beyond the limits of possible experience (Kritik der reinen Vernunft B
25, A 296/B 352, A 327/B 384). Emerson’s “transcendental” and “transcendent” have
little connection with either Kantian term. Emerson uses “transcendental” as virtually
synonymous with “intuitive” and “transcendent” to designate what is accessible only
through intuition (in the exalted Emersonian, not the humble Kantian, sense of
“intuition,” i.e., through immediate, noninferential, suprarational apprehension; Kant,
by contrast, considered intuition [Anschauung] to be purely sensuous [sinnlich]—Kriktik
der reinen Vernunft A 35/B 52, B 148–49, 159, 302n). In “The Transcendentalist,”
Emerson attributed to Kant the notion that “Transcendental forms” are “intuitions of the
mind” and traced to “the extraordinary profoundness and precision” of Kant’s thought
self striving to become the Self, and more fully than anything else, such
striving confronts the individual with “the moral fact of the Unattain-
able, the flying Perfect . . . at once the inspirer and the condemner of
every success” (CW 2:179).
Emerson regarded discord and dissonance as inherent in our aware-
ness of our own individuality. As conscious individuals we cannot help
realizing that our very self-definition involves separation, alienation,
and disharmony, and this realization is as necessary to our self-concept
as it is painful. In “Experience,” Emerson stated our problem in all its
poignancy and finality: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,
the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the
Fall of Man” (CW 3:43). Years later he speculated: “It may be that we
have no right here as individuals; that the existence of an embodied
man marks fall & sin. . . . We have stopped, we have stagnated, we have
appropriated or become selfish. . . . It is for this reason that we are
dualists . . . and [confront] the inexplicable jangle of Fate & freedom,
matter & spirit” (JMN 14:337). Human striving for harmony is a never-
ending effort to overcome the duality, the discordance at the heart of
our experience, and this striving takes place on three levels: conscience,
character, and culture.
Emerson identifies conscience with the moral sentiment and with
“the moral reason of man” (CS 1:116; 3:19), and given his belief in
the primacy of the moral (or practical) reason, he not surprisingly
considers conscience to be determinative of individual identity. Con-
science dominates all the powers of the mind and “gives to all these
powers the unity of one moral being” (CS 1:117). Conscience also
gives access to transcendent reality: “this Conscience, this Reason . . .
is the Presence of God to man” (CS 4:175). Through conscience as a
cognitive faculty the individual achieves identification, albeit partial,
with God. Emerson here embraces the ancient idea, stated aphoristi-
cally by Heraclitus and more poetically by Plotinus, that all knowledge
presupposes a certain similarity between the knower and the object of
knowledge.10 In Emerson’s words, “You cannot form an idea of that
the prestige of Kantian terminology, so that “whatever belongs to the class of intuitive
thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental” (CW 1:207).
10. For Heraclitus, see CS 3:190n3; for Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.9. Plotinus’ statement
was apparently a favorite among the Romantics. Coleridge quoted it in its original
Self-Realization 65
to which there is nothing resembling in yourself,” or “What is unlike

us, we cannot perceive” (CS 3:181, 190). But since the identification
of the individual self with God is incomplete, the self experiences
transcendent reality “in the form of a law” (CS 3:43), that is, as a
moral imperative commanding ever-closer identification. As already
indicated, the very concept of obligation, of “ought,” makes sense only
in reference to a self that is finite and imperfect. Conscience commands
precisely because it is that “something in us which is higher and better
than we” (CS 4:175).
Conscience is thus inevitably a cause of disharmony, of a divided self
in which one part legislates for and commands the other. We have an
example here of the mind interiorizing the master-slave relationship
and thus transforming itself into what Hegel famously called “the
unhappy consciousness” (das unglückliche Bewußtsein) and Emerson
“the double consciousness” (CS 4:215).11 There are, Emerson says,
“two selfs . . . within this erring, passionate, mortal self, sits a supreme,
calm, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is stronger
than I am, it is wiser than I am” (CS 4:215). Another way of expressing
this self-division is to make conscience the seat of guilt. By its very
nature, guilt manifests the self’s awareness of the discrepancy between
what is and what ought to be. Guilt derives from the felt contrast
between the self as ideal perceiver of law and the self as inadequate
executor of law. The perfection of the moral law is a source of joy when
accepted theoretically, but it stands as a perpetual reproof to practical
ability: “Pleasant it is to the soul, painful it is to the conscience to
recognize . . . the fixed eternity of moral laws” (JMN 3:286).
One possible road to harmony, obviously, is for the self to act in
obedience to the moral law. Emerson regards conscience as the faculty
of not only moral cognition but also moral motivation. Conscience
“is not a simple perception that one action is good and another evil
and ending there,” but “it includes a command to adopt or to reject;—to
perform one action, and to forbear another” (CS 1:191). The exact
relationship, however, among conscience, motive, and act troubled
Greek at the end of chapter 6 of Biographia Literaria, and it inspired poetic renderings
by Blake (For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, Frontispiece, Poetry and Prose, 568) and
Goethe (“Zahme Xenien” iii, Gedenkausgabe 1:629).
11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 158.
Emerson as much as it did his Unitarian contemporaries.12 He had,
furthermore, serious doubts about the moral quality of human mo-
tives and about the moral status of action as such.
Emerson’s doubts about motives arose from his sense of human
self-opaqueness, of the difficulty of our reading completely and cor-
rectly our own consciousness. David Robinson claims that Emerson’s
“fundamental moral principle” was “disinterestedness”—that is, “the
willingness to elevate principle over self-interest”—so that, paradox-
ically, in Emerson’s “philosophy of self-culture, self-sacrifice was the
highest achievement of the self,” and “selfless devotion to another . . .
becomes a culmination of the culture of the individual.” I am troubled
by this claim because Emerson strikes me as a little too “Nietzschean”
to see much virtue in selflessness; but even if one accepted it, the
fact remains that we can never be really sure about the purity of our
motives, that is, about the degree to which our actions are dictated
by our sense of moral obligation versus the degree to which they are
dictated by prudence or self-interest. Believing that our motives are
purely moral is probably but one more example of our infinite capacity
for self-delusion, “so difficult is it to read our own consciousness
without mistakes” (JMN 4:312). From this point of view even the self-
abnegation of the saint is suspect: does he or she sacrifice so much
here on earth for the sake of a much more attractive posthumous
reward? Does the Christian martyr court martyrdom (thus evincing
perhaps, as Nietzsche suggested, displaced suicidal tendencies) for
the sake of eternal bliss? Even a qualified “yes” in answer to these
questions would introduce an element of self-interest detracting from
the moral purity of the saint’s and martyr’s lives or actions. While
still a clergyman, Emerson acknowledged that “it is most true that
holding the belief of the immortality of the soul, we cannot sever our
interest from our duty” (CS 2:31); throughout his intellectual career,
he recognized the near impossibility of disentangling the pursuit of
virtue from considerations of personal advantage (however defined—
happiness, health, economic independence, etc.). Such perplexities of
the spirit drove Spinoza to the drastic conclusion that he who truly
loves God “cannot seek that God should love him in return.” They
also induced Jonathan Edwards’s disciple Samuel Hopkins to express
12. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 56–64.

Self-Realization 67
the notorious view that the believer shows truly devout disinterest-
edness by being content to be damned for the glory of God—a view
that Emerson considered “an extravagance” and an “absurdity,” yet
having an undeniable element of the “generous and sublime” in it
(CS 2:33).13
Emerson was also keenly aware of the frequent lack of correspon-
dence between motive and action. In 1832 he even considered writing
a book whose third chapter was to be devoted to defending the propo-
sition “That good motives are at the bottom of [many] bad actions”
(JMN 3:316; the square brackets are Emerson’s). Conversely, “good
actions may be done from bad motives” (CS 2:46). The discrepancy
between motive and action and its attendant moral confusion explain
why conscience expresses itself more clearly and emphatically in the
negative, that is, commanding the omission (“thou shalt not”) rather
than the commission (“thou shalt”) of an action. As Emerson says,
“we can all feel we are rather commanded what not to do than urged
to any performance” (CS 1:193). A command in the negative (e.g.,
“thou shalt not steal”) is clear and does not allow motives to come
into play: we are told not to act. A command in the positive (e.g., “thou
shalt help the poor”) is vague (how should one help the poor?), and
its execution is “corruptible” by impure motives (does one help the
poor out of self-interest, out of a desire, for instance, to help prevent
social unrest, which might threaten one’s socially and economically
privileged position?).14 Action has the further drawback of imposing
limitations upon the freedom inherent in conscience as moral law-
giver. Like its ontological and epistemological parallels (Spirit and
Reason), conscience (the moral sentiment) is free of the limitations
characterizing the inferior realms of Nature, Understanding, and con-
ventional morality. Action is an irruption of freedom into the realm
of necessity—the realm of Nature, natural law, phenomena—and thus
inevitably partakes of its limitations. The “perfect freedom” that Emer-
son claims to be “the only counterpart to nature” (JMN 14:53) is
13. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 137, 110, 166. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft § 131, Sämtliche Werke, 3:485. Baruch Spinoza, Ethica 5.19.
On Hopkins, see Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 351.
14. For interesting Kantian parallels to Emerson’s argument, see Sullivan, Immanuel
Kant’s Moral Theory, 50–54.
inevitably compromised through the fusion of conscience and nature
in moral action.
Although necessary to harmonious self-realization, as will become
clearer when we discuss character and culture, moral action does not
enjoy the high status that Emerson grants to moral principles. His
commitment to an idealistic ethic made his preference for the purity
of principle over the mixed nature of action inevitable. He gives voice
to this preference with unrelenting frequency. “In the eyes of God,” he
assures his audience, “not the actions but the principles of moral beings
are regarded. . . . Principles are important . . . actions have no other
importance than that derived from the principle” (CS 1:179). What
matters is the moral status of the principles motivating actions, not
the actions “for themselves” (CS 1:181). Hence when moral littleness
prevails, it “consists in the purpose not in the act” (CS 2:153). Such
emphasis on the motivating principle precluded Emerson’s seeing
much merit in standard teleological ethics: if actions are unimportant
in themselves, neither do they derive importance from “their effects
on the world” (CS 1:181). The well-informed moralist “does not judge
of actions, by their effects, but by their principle” (CS 1:200). On the
same grounds Emerson dismisses “mere beneficence,” which is “good
for nothing without it is accompanied by benevolence or the will to
do good” (CS 2:134; emphasis added). In sum, since “the merit of all
action is measured by the principle” and since all action “governed
by any less than the highest [principle]” is morally flawed, we need to
embrace “this duty of steady Reflection upon the principles by which
we should live” (CS 2:73, 127).
By thus emphasizing the primacy of principle and making the inner
determinations of conscience the primary focus of moral life, Emerson
embraces an ethical position that is, once again, remarkably similar
to Kant’s. For Kant, moral life was primarily a matter of “intention,”
“mental disposition,” “the inner legislation of reason,” and not of
“performances in the world.” The worth of the good will, for example,
“cannot be diminished or increased, and cannot be outweighed or
dimmed, either by any consequences or by the varying contexts in
which it may be found.” We should strive, of course, to carry out the
decisions of conscience (such endeavor proves the depth of our inner
commitment), but what really matters is the quality, the purity of
our intentions, whether or not we succeed in realizing them. Equally
Self-Realization 69
inner-directed, and equally Kantian, is Emerson’s emphasis on rever-

ence or respect, on “the sincere veneration . . . of duty,” “this devout
reverence of Duty,” as an important factor in moral life (CS 4:139).
Kant defined duty as “the requirement to act out of respect for the law”
(die Nothwendigkeit einer Handlung aus Achtung fürs Gesetz); indeed, he
regarded such respect as the one unexceptionable motive to moral
action. But since, in Kant’s view, the moral law is a product of our
reason, the truly moral person acts out of respect for himself or herself
as a rational being. As moral self-legislator the human, qua rational
being, possesses absolute worth and intrinsic dignity (dignitas interna),
which imbue him or her with the highest self-respect (die höchste Selb-
stschätzung), with feelings of profound reverence (reverentia) toward
himself or herself. Such reverence is, in fact, a duty, as is implied by
the Kantian definition of duty given above.15
Although as an ethical intuitionist Emerson does not embrace
Kant’s vision of human reason as purely self-legislative, he is as com-
mitted as Kant to the view that humans derive their true worth and
dignity from their definition as moral beings. Is it not “the noblest
attribute in us,” Emerson asks rhetorically but emphatically, “that we
are capable of being addressed on the ground of moral principles?” (CS
3:65). Like Kant, furthermore, Emerson believes that self-reverence is
not only inspired by this “noblest attribute” but also commanded as
a duty. Without self-reverence, without respect for our inward dignity
as moral beings, we could not possibly obey the moral law. Emerson,
therefore, makes self-reverence the basis of all other duties. Clearly, his
ethical intuitionism did not preclude his according self-reverence as
great an importance in his moral thought as had resulted from reason’s
absolute autonomy in Kant’s ethics: “The authority of conscience and
the love of truth in us is the manifestation of [God]; and therefore let
each man . . . hold his own nature in a reverential awe” (CS 2:254). Kant,
of course, would have objected to the terms “God” and “nature” in this
statement: he would have regarded both as proof of Emerson’s having
embraced heteronomy in his moral thinking. As we saw, Kant’s entire
15. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 66–67; Paton, The Categorical Imperative,
37. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:400; Kritik der
praktischen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften 5:78; Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Tugendlehre
§11, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:434–36.
endeavor was directed to liberating the moral law from any “extrinsic”
authority and basing it firmly in autonomous (self-legislative) human
reason. Still, the point at issue here is self-reverence, and its degree or
intensity is in no way dependent, it appears, on how the moral self
is constituted—whether it equals pure practical reason, as in Kant, or
involves moral intuitions and man’s moral “nature,” as in Emerson.
Emerson was aware that “reverence thyself” was an ancient maxim
(CS 1:163 and n3). He associated it with the Stoics, as in his 1837
lecture on “Ethics”: “the sufficient rule of all Ethics is comprised in
the Stoical precept, Reverence Thyself” (EL 2:152). A year later this
became, in the Divinity School “Address,” “the great stoical doctrine,
Obey thyself” (CW 1:82). Stoic ethics held indeed considerable appeal
for Emerson. It anchored moral responsibility and moral authority
firmly within the individual. According to Ludwig Edelstein, the Stoic
knew “that even in the last extremity of moral action he and his reason
must be the sole point of reference.” Such views resulted, as Herschel
Baker points out, “in a strong assertion of personality.”16 But Emerson
also sensed the limitations of Stoic self-reverence: as a modern thinker,
he found the Stoics lacking in true inwardness, in real self-reflexivity.
The Stoics, after all, rooted their ethics in their vision of the cosmos;
they made their ethics dependent upon their physics. Such outward
orientation proved increasingly unacceptable as Western thought de-
voted itself to the exploration of an ever-richer, deeper, more complex
and problematic human subjectivity (examples are numberless; suffice
it to mention St. Augustine, Montaigne, Puritan introspection, and
Rousseau). Emersonian self-reverence is thus very different from the
Stoical variety, and Emerson knew that on this subject his thought was
attuned to that of a philosopher who, though like Emerson respectful
of the Stoics, had departed from them radically: “Kant . . . searched
the Metaphysics of the Selfreverence which is the favourite position of
modern ethics” (JMN 9:62).
Unfailing and all-encompassing reverence for oneself as a moral
being would result in moral perfection—in a life brought “into har-
mony with . . . conscience” and in a conscience “put . . . into harmony
with the real and eternal” (CS 4:206, 235). Another name for this
16. Edelstein, The Meaning of Stoicism, 90; Baker, The Image of Man, 79.
Self-Realization 71
state would be holiness, which Emerson defines as “the state of man

under the dominion of the moral sentiment” (EL 2:340). But the very
fact that Emerson regards self-reverence as a duty shows, of course,
that the dominion of the moral sentiment is incomplete. Though “the
good man reveres himself, reveres his conscience” (CS 1:163), he is
“the good man” precisely because he endeavors to do his duty, an
endeavor that would be meaningless on the part of the holy (perfect)
man. The conscience even of the good man glimpses harmony only
through its unceasing efforts to overcome disharmony. The principle
of compensation—“the great law of Compensation in our moral na-
ture” (JMN 4:313–14)—plays so prominent a part in Emerson’s ethics
because he regards conscience as being perpetually in the process of
trying to recover its moral “balance.” Conscience is endlessly “self-
retributive”; indeed, “every moment is a judgment day, because, every
act puts the agent in a new condition” (JMN 4:46).
There is, however, “a deeper fact in the soul than compensation,
to wit, its own nature.” In language reminiscent of Meister Eckhart,
Böhme (whom Emerson usually calls Behmen), and Schelling, Emer-
son speaks of the soul as “the aboriginal abyss [the Abgrund, Ungrund,
Urgrund, or just plain Grund of the Germans] of real Being.” He also
refers to the soul as “Essence, or God.” Put differently, “the soul is”;
it is “the whole”; it equals “Being” (CW 2:70). Emerson then tries to
establish that Being is harmony, and he does so through a claim that
reads like a reply to Spinoza’s famous doctrine that all affirmation is
negation (in the sense that all affirmation, definition, determination,
or identification implies contrastive negation; any concept or thing
is what it is by virtue of its not being any other concept or thing).
According to Emerson, “Being is the vast affirmative, excluding nega-
tion” (CW 2:70). By denying to Being negation, “the awesome power
of the negative” (die ungeheure Macht des Negativen), as Hegel called it,
Emerson precludes the possibility of any dialectic within Being. Being
enjoys the stasis inherent in absolute harmony. Emerson expresses
this simply but conclusively: “Being is . . . self-balanced” (CW 2:70).
His favorite metaphor for the state of moral perfection is health, and
since (in ethical contexts) he adopts the Platonic view of health (see
chapter 1), he thereby again emphasizes that the essence of perfection
is harmony. Plato had adopted the theory of Alcmaeon that “health
depends on the . . . ‘constitutional balance’ between the constituents
of the organism.” In The Republic he established a clear parallel between
health as physical harmony and virtue as spiritual harmony.17 Emerson
readily shared such views: “The health which we call Virtue is an
equipoise” (W 11:392).
The individual conscience recognizes the harmony that is Being
as its perfect “other” and as its spiritual destination. The problem,
as Thoreau said, is “how to . . . actually migrate thither.”18 At present,
Emerson suggests, this end is attainable only in those rare states of
absolute identification of self with Being and attendant “loss” of self.
Examples would be ecstasy, as in the “transparent eye-ball” experience
in Nature, in which state the soul beholds “virtue, and not duties”
(CW 1:10, 131); prayer, rightly conceived, which is “the soliloquy of
a beholding and jubilant soul . . . the spirit of God pronouncing his
works good” (CW 2:44); and the absolute subjection of self to moral
principle: “If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety
of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that
man with justice” (CW 1:78). Such states, of course, are as rare as they
are transcendent. As Emerson says, “Our faith comes in moments; our
vice is habitual” (CW 2:159).
17. For Emerson’s awareness of Schelling’s Grund and Abgrund—“the Ground or

Abyss which Schelling so celebrates”—see JMN 6:312, 9:223. Much earlier, at the age
of nineteen, Emerson spoke of “that Platonic dream, that the soul of the individual
was but an emanation from the Abyss of Deity” (JMN 2:6). Both “emanation” and
“Abyss” indicate that this statement is Gnostic and Plotinian rather than Platonic.
Christian Gnostics like Valentinus (100–165) spoke of God as the unknown Deep
or Abyss (buthos) which “realizes” itself through a hierarchically ordered series of
thirty emanations. Similarly, the One (to hen) of Plotinus, from which everything
rational, spiritual, and material emanates, is absolutely inconceivable. It is “something”
of which nothing whatsoever can be predicated, and it is therefore truly abusson
(literally, bottomless; hence, unfathomable: a conceptual abyss). This Neoplatonic
idea became one of the sources of Christian “negative theology,” which holds that
God can be “defined” only through the negation of what is conceivable. God is, for
instance, invisible, unimaginable, ineffable, timeless, unlimited, uncreated—in a word,
“absolutely and intrinsically other than and opposite of everything that is and can
be thought” (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 29; also 179–86). On the multiple
ancient sources of “negative theology,” see Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 1:237–
38. Alfred Doppler provides a wide-ranging discussion of the abyss motif in “Das Motiv
des Abgrunds,” Der Abgrund des Ichs, 9–35. Baruch Spinoza, “Epistola 50,” Opera, 4:240.
Only Spinoza’s “God” precludes negation because his “God” is “infinite existence,” i.e.,
existence without any limitation and thus without any scope for negation. “God,” in
sum, is absolute affirmation. See Ethica 1.8. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 29. A. E.
Taylor, Plato, 194; Plato, Republic 444C–E.
18. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ch. “Higher Laws,” ad fin.
Self-Realization 73
The pursuit of harmony is also an imperative on the level of charac-

ter. The cultivation of character ranked high among the moral concerns
of Emerson’s day. His one-time ministerial colleague, Henry Ware, Jr.,
managed to become a best-selling author with his handbook, On the
Formation of the Christian Character (1831).19 This preoccupation with
character was an expression of the strongly ethical tendencies within
Unitarian piety. And as Daniel Howe points out,
If there were a single conception that dominated Harvard Unitar-

ian thought . . . it was the conception of harmony. The Unitarian
conscience was not a repressive, but an expressive faculty: not to
crush, but to harmonize, regulate, and balance, was the task of
the ruling power. . . . Unitarian preachers . . . frequently led their
congregations in the contemplation of the balanced character of
a virtuous man. . . . When they rejected the doctrine of innate de-
pravity, Unitarians were led to espouse the view that sin consisted
of a breakdown in the internal harmony.20
Although the mature Emerson was less concerned with the religious
factors shaping the Unitarian conception of the Christian character, he
was as committed as his Unitarian contemporaries to the conception
of character as harmony. For him, the building of character was but
another means of self-realization, of striving toward the harmony
of Self. Character, therefore, as Barbara Packer rightly says, meant
much more to Emerson than the ēthos bequeathed to him and to
his classically educated contemporaries by the Greek (and Roman)
rhetoricians.21
The primary locus of character, in Emerson’s view, is the will. His
close identification of character with will can be easily documented.
For instance, in an 1838 journal entry he states: “Will or Reality re-
minds you of nothing else. It takes place of the whole creation” (JMN
7:146; emphasis added). Transferred to “Self-Reliance,” this passage
reads: “Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place
of the whole creation” (CW 2:35; emphasis added). Since will and
character share reality and centrality in the same degree, and since both
19. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 106–8; Robinson, Apostle of Culture, 26, 32;
Robinson, “An Introductory Historical Essay,” CS 1:7.
21. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 182.
are expressions of the practical Reason’s self-actualization, Emerson
saw no harm in using “will” and “character” interchangeably. In-
deed, “a grand will . . . when legitimate and abiding, we call character”
(W 8:117).
The Emersonian will is not purely conative; it has also an intellectual
determinant. The will has to be guided by the mind’s perception
of truth or rightness, which perception is then actualized through
the conative faculty of the mind. Both components, the intellectual
and the conative, are equally necessary to the making of the will
(W 6:29). Without perception, the will would not rise above the
level of blind instinct; without conation, the will would be still-born.
The Emersonian will is perhaps best described as “Reason-determined
conation.”
Responsive to the Reason, the will discovers itself to be at variance
with nature (thought of as a system of causality) and fate (which is
but a name for as yet “unpenetrated causes”—W 6:32), and in the
process discovers its freedom, that is, its independence from the world
of necessity, whether actual (“nature”) or presumptive (“fate”). The
will is not mechanically determined but is spontaneous, in the sense
of being able to introduce actions into nature not dependent upon
natural causation (EL 3:144). As humans, “we are not creatures of
necessity, but creatures of free will”; therefore, we are not condemned
to move “like the silent orb we tread upon, in one eternal round” (CS
2:52). Our moral constitution lifts us out of the phenomenal world
in which we have our physical existence. The human “has his life in
Nature, like a beast: but choice is born in him. . . . He chooses,—as
the rest of the creation does not” (W 10:91–92). Schiller remarks that
a starving human experiences hunger as intensely as does a starving
animal (and thus participates in the world of nature or necessity), but
that whereas the starving animal is ineluctably driven by its nature to
satisfy its craving for food (and thus remains in the world of nature
or necessity), the human can choose to continue starving, thereby
asserting his or her independence from that world (and thus attaining
the level of morality or freedom).22 Agreeing that morality “implies
freedom and will,” Emerson was as insistent as Schiller that we should
22. Friedrich Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde,” Werke, 4:176.

Self-Realization 75
strive to make the will truly free by liberating it “from the sheaths and
clogs of organization” (W 10:91; 6:36).
One way of accomplishing this liberation is by transforming the
world of blind necessity as much as possible into a realm of rational
(Reason-determined) freedom. Brute necessity (afflicting us with “the
pain of an alien world; a world not yet subdued by the thought”—CW
1:106) must be made to yield to rational vision. It must be made to
reflect the order and harmony inherent in the Reason. This end can be
accomplished only by sublating the world of perfect causality by “a will
as perfectly organized,” that is, by a will realizing the “perfect freedom”
that is but another name for the moral law: “It is the perfection of free
agency to . . . find our perfect freedom a perfect law” (JMN 14:53;
CS 3:71). And no matter what the order of magnitude, a victory of
the will always amounts to making Reason and rational law prevail
over necessity. Emerson’s commitment to the (moral, free) will as
a “harmonizing” force in a disturbingly “alien world” is his way of
expressing the deeply felt human need for some form of ultimate
harmony. The human intellect, Iris Murdoch says, “is naturally one-
making. To evaluate, understand, classify, place in order of merit,
implies a wider unified system. . . . We fear plurality, diffusion, sense-
less accident, chaos, we want to transform what we cannot dominate
or understand.” Similarly, Thomas McFarland regards the “complete”
philosophical systems produced or attempted by many of Emerson’s
contemporaries as “a reflection, in the special realm of philosophy, of
a universal concern, the need to harmonize.”23 The mature Emerson
had little patience with “systemgrinder[s]” of any kind (JMN 5:75;
W 12:11–13), but in his interpretation of the moral life as an attempt
to impose a world of freedom, and therefore the (practical) Reason,
upon the world of necessity, he gave voice to the same human desire
to create a “harmonious” world, a world in which the human spirit
could recognize the harmony of the Reason, and thus itself.
This commitment to the harmony inherent in the Reason also
explains why Emerson prefers the “quality” of the good will to the
actions resulting from such will. Action, to be sure, plays a more
important part on the level of character than on that of conscience.
23. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 1–2; McFarland, Coleridge and
the Pantheist Tradition, xxxix.
Nevertheless, action is always partial, conditional, affected by the
limitations both of the agent and of the phenomenal world in which
it takes place. Action restricts, as Goethe said;24 it implies roads not
taken. In Emerson’s words, “A certain partiality, a headiness, and loss
of balance, is the tax which all action must pay” (CW 4:154). Like Kant,
therefore, Emerson is more concerned with the quality (goodness,
spontaneity) of the will as such, and he regards a will thus qualified
as “the best account of virtue at which we are at present able to arrive”
(EL 3:144). Kant said that the only thing in the world, or even outside
the world, conceivable as good without limitation is the good will, but
he added that the good will is good not through what it achieves but
through being what it is in itself: it is good “through willing alone.”25
For Emerson also, “it is more important that these victories [of the
good will] should be won by the mind than that the events should
turn up as we desire” (CS 2:106). What matters is “the feeling of
duty,” which is synonymous with “Virtue” (CS 2:34). Only virtue
thus defined is, according to Emerson, “free” and “absolute.” It is also
“self-existent” (CS 2:74). It thus also becomes synonymous with the
practical Reason, and consequently Emerson finds it possible to claim
that virtue always “subordinates [the world] to the mind” (CW 1:36).
But this subordination is achieved ideally rather than actually. When
Emerson speaks of the omnipotence of the “virtuous will” (JMN 4:257;
7:183), when he grants the will the power to chain “the wheel of
Chance” (CW 2:50), he asserts an ideal and therefore, in his view, a
real rather than a merely actual truth. Emerson here shows himself
an exponent of the moral philosophy of his age, which, he claims,
“recedes to grounds more and more purely ideal and at last entrenches
man in the sentiment of Duty as the only reality” (EL 3:308; emphasis
added).
This whole argument notwithstanding, action does play an impor-
tant part in Emerson’s ethic of character, but his commitment to the
pursuit of the harmonious self emerges also here in his tendency to in-
terpret action as primarily a matter of overcoming disharmony. Action
is an attempt to overcome obstacles within (suffering, unhappiness)
24. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 8.5, Gedenkausgabe, 7:590.
25. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:393–94,
399–400.
Self-Realization 77
and without (nature, society) that both impede and invite the self’s
attainment of wholeness, of moral and spiritual health. Obstacles are
a necessary antithesis in the self’s endless dialectical striving for har-
mony. Emerson repeatedly emphasizes the will’s need to be “educated”
through struggle, and he therefore stresses such qualities of character
as courage, perseverance, and resilience. David Robinson is certainly
right in stressing that Emerson’s position exemplifies the Unitarian
doctrine of probation, which held that “life was a testing ground for
the cultivation of character.” The Unitarians had, in fact, “translated
the question of salvation into one of character development.”26
Emerson also reflects a generally Protestant ethic according to which
moral improvement is the fruit of struggle against the evils of this
world, as opposed to the view of the medieval Church that moral
perfection was attainable primarily through renunciation of the world
and avoidance of its temptations. Areopagitica, which Emerson called
“the most splendid” of Milton’s prose works (EL 1:147), expresses this
Protestant ethic in a passage that Emerson repeatedly echoes:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & un-

breath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks
out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not
without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into
the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies
us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That vertue there-
fore which . . . knows not the utmost that vice promises to her
followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure.27
Emerson agreed. He insisted that “man should be acquainted with

vice, and earn the crown of virtue in overcoming it” (CS 2:152). Even
if the adult could regain the blank innocence of early childhood, he
would but return to an inferior, premoral state, a state precluding
“temptation, and therefore . . . virtu[e].” The reward of moral struggle
“will not be innocence, it will be something far more glorious, it will
be virtue” (CS 2:172, 174). We cannot even imagine, Emerson says,
“the highest good . . . as existing without evil.” What is dialectically
26. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 11; “An Introductory Historical Essay,”
CS 1:5.
27. John Milton, Areopagitica, Complete Prose Works, 2:515–16.
necessary to our imagining, is equally so to our acting: “without evil
there can be no such thing as virtue, which consists in overcoming
evil” (CS 3:58). To prepare for such struggles, we need to (in language
echoing Milton’s) “breathe and exercise the soul,” we need to acquire
an “athletic virtue” (CW 2:154; CS 2:74). Every victory obtained over
the disruptive force of evil is one step closer to harmony of character,
or as Emerson puts it, “to simplicity of character,—to that unity of
purpose and word and action, that is in God, and in the children of
God” (CS 2:175).
At present, however, we fail to live up to that vision of harmony
and unity. The will is often directed to narrow ends. Our very prayers
are “a disease of the will.” They are prayers of petition, they crave, and
thus they evidence our lack of faith in our higher Self: “As soon as the
man is at one with God, he will not beg” (CW 2:44–45). Moreover,
by obeying inclination rather than duty, the will reveals its adherence
to the world of necessity rather than to the realm of moral freedom.
For this reason, Emerson says that though the will is strong, “Trust
is stronger”—trust in the moral order that alone should dictate the
direction of the will (EL 3:312). Once again, it appears that Emerson
is writing in the optative mood: character is a desideratum; it is a
goal to be pursued endlessly. The harmonious self has never been
realized. Although it is easy to find “men of great gifts,” there have
never been any truly “symmetrical men.” Even Shakespeare suffers
from “halfness” (CW 3:134; 4:124). Yet the ideal keeps beckoning
with never-diminishing force: “The least hint sets us on the pursuit of
a character, which no man realizes” (CW 3:133).
The third level on which the pursuit of harmony is a moral impera-

tive is that of culture, which to Emerson meant essentially self-culture,
that is, the full, harmonious development of one’s latent capacities
in order to achieve as nearly perfect a realization as possible of one’s
human potential. Emerson’s concept of self-culture had its roots in
Unitarian thought, as David Robinson has shown; it also owed much
to the ideal of self-culture (Bildung) that dominated the classic age of
German literature (ca. 1775–1830) and that was exemplified for New
Englanders primarily by the works and personality of Goethe. But
as one would expect, Emerson put his own interpretation upon self-
culture. For the Germans, self-culture was a cultural ideal; for Emerson,
Self-Realization 79
it was a moral obligation—indeed, the fundamental moral obligation.

Although this moral emphasis aligns him with the Unitarian posi-
tion, Emerson’s pantheism led to a very different sense of self and
self-culture. Unitarian humanism, as Robinson insists, “was indeed
Christian humanism, essentially because the Unitarians accepted the
biblical revelation as the basis of their faith.” Although, stimulated
by the example of Christ, the Unitarians might strive for “Likeness to
God” (to quote the title of one of William Ellery Channing’s sermons),
they never lost sight of the ontic distinction between God and man.
The mature Emerson insisted on complete self-culture precisely because
that is the only way of performing one’s duties to God pantheistically
conceived. The pantheistic God, to be sure, achieves self-realization
in Nature, but only in humans does God’s self-realization rise to con-
sciousness, to self-awareness. The self-culture of humans thus becomes
the conscious self-realization of God. Only humans, therefore, can
experience self-realization as a moral obligation. As Kant said, the
concept “ought” is meaningless when applied to Nature.28 Nature is in-
escapably “law-abiding”; it truly (more than Martin Luther at Worms)
“cannot do otherwise.” The human, on the other hand, perceiving
self-realization as the highest good, apprehends striving for the most
complete self-culture as a duty—and for that very reason retains the
freedom to choose not to engage in such striving.
Emerson leaves no doubt about his post-Unitarian (or generally
post-Christian) orientation when it comes to matters of self-culture.
“There are innocent men,” he says, “who worship God after the tra-
dition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended
to the use of all their faculties” (CW 1:43–44). Or disagreeing with
the Shorter Catechism (whose well-known opening Question and
Answer are: “What is the chief End of Man?” / “Man’s chief End is
to Glorify God, and to Enjoy Him for ever.”), Emerson writes: “His
own Culture,—the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man. A
divine impulse at the core of his being, impels him to this. . . . The true
culture is a discipline so universal as to demonstrate that no part of a
man was made in vain” (EL 2:215). Measured by this standard, Jesus
fell far short of “true culture”: “Perfect in the sense of complete man
28. Robinson, Apostle of Culture, 22. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 547/B 575.
he seems not to me to be, but a very exclusive & partial development
of the moral element. . . . a perfect man should exhibit all the traits
of humanity” (L 1:451). Jesus has not “fulfilled all the conditions of
man’s existence, [nor] carried out to the utmost, at least by implication,
all man’s powers.” Consequently, there can be no imitatio Christi for
a person striving for self-culture as defined by Emerson: “Do you ask
me if I would rather resemble Jesus than any other man? If I should
say Yes, I should suspect myself of superstition” (JMN 5:71–72). It is
obvious that such views reflect a position much closer to Goethean
Bildung (itself connected with Goethe’s pantheism) than to Unitarian
self-culture.
Emerson, nevertheless, remained committed to a more specific
morality than did Goethe. Anything at all contributing to the full
and harmonious development of our humanity Goethe considered
to be moral. It was moral because it was a factor in our human
development.29 Emerson, equally committed to full human develop-
ment, nonetheless wanted that development to be guided by a sense of
what was morally “right,” and on this point he found Goethe wanting.
During his first Italian journey, Goethe apparently considered it part
of his education to study classical sculpture while in the arms of his
well-proportioned Roman mistress.30 Noting this fact in his journal,
Emerson, while praising Goethe’s commitment to “self-cultivation,”
deplored his inability “to perceive the right of his moral sentiments to
his allegiance.” As a result, Goethe, while capable of saying “all his fine
things about Entsagen [renunciation, self-denial],” often appears to be
no better than another Earl of Rochester (JMN 4:301). Or as Emerson
put it with revealing bluntness a few months later (November 20,
1834), in a letter countering Carlyle’s “apotheosis” of his “eminent
friend Goethe,” “the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals
in such as he” (CEC 107). Clearly, Emersonian self-culture had a
moral emphasis absent from Goethean Bildung—or rather, the moral
provenance was different in each case. For Emerson, self-culture had
to meet certain criteria derived from the moral sentiment; in Goethe’s
29. For Goethe’s comprehensive understanding of the term ethisch (ethical, moral),
see Dorothea Kuhn, Empirische und ideelle Wirklichkeit: Studien über Goethes Kritik des
französischen Akademiestreites, 134, 289n2.
30. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Römische Elegien 5.7–10, Gedenkausgabe, 1:167.
Self-Realization 81
view, the ideal of Bildung produced the moral criteria by which one
should measure the rightness of one’s actions. Moreover, whereas for
Goethe Bildung was an end in itself, Emerson wants us to do our duty
to ourselves so that we may become “mightier moral agents.” Still,
like Goethe, he recognizes that “we shall not have done our duty to
ourselves until we have carried all our powers to the highest perfection
those powers can reach” (CS 1:209). In fact, a person whose develop-
ment is “partial” as a result of his or her cultivation of “particular
faculties” and neglect of others is “in a degree depraved” (CS 2:227).
Emersonian self-culture, in other words, has both instrumental and
intrinsic value: on the one hand, it fits us to become “mightier moral
agents” (CS 1:209), but on the other, a failure in self-culture is in itself
a moral failure.
Emerson’s moral emphasis in relation to self-culture explains his
repeated insistence that there can be no full intellectual development
without a parallel development of the moral faculty. Once again, his
concern with harmonious self-realization is patent here. He wants no
separate cultivation of intellect and virtue because he is convinced
that both can advance only in tandem. But given the intellectualist
illusions of his age, he often feels the need to give morality pride of
place, as when he says that “moral superiority explains intellectual,” or
that “the Intellect is the head of the Understanding but is the feet of the
Moral Power” (JMN 10:135, 355). Emerson’s real point, however, is
that there exists “an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals,”
that “the intellect and the moral sentiment . . . in the last analysis
can never be separated” (W 6:217; 8:302). Both morals and intellect
“ennoble” humans, but only if they unite in one human being do we
have someone “truly great” (W 8:317). At the highest level, intellect
and morality harmonize to the point of becoming one and the same:
“the intellect in its purity and the moral sense in its purity are not
distinguished from each other” (W 12:417).
Since self-culture involves the fullest possible realization of all one’s
powers, action plays a more important part here than it does on the
level of conscience or even of character. Emerson stresses the need
for self-expression in word and deed, for creativity and productivity,
for work. Only through our efforts to make recalcitrant material (of
whatever kind—language, nature, society) vehicular to our thought or
will can our latent powers be evoked and exercised: “By doing his own
work, [man] unfolds himself” (CW 2:83). In the process we acquire
greater self-knowledge, which is further enhanced by the objectifica-
tion of the inner self that is inherent in all expression. Expression
means “embodiment of . . . thought” (W 7:38). Thought arises “to the
end that it may be uttered and acted” (W 7:39), and in its objectified
form it is a mirror to the mind whence it arose. We need expression
because self-knowledge is an ideal and an imperative, and without
expression we continue to be burdened with the “painful secret” of
our inarticulate self (CW 3:4). Expression helps us understand what
we are and thus helps to make us real to ourselves.
Emerson’s interest in work goes far beyond its economic and social
significance. Its most important aspect is the “ethical instruction” it
provides. Its true benefits are “knowledge and virtue,” which, rather
than “wealth and credit,” are productive of real power (EL 2:126–
27). Only he “can become a master, who learns the secrets of labor.”
Even “the seer himself” suffers “some loss of power and of truth”
through “separation from labor” (CW 1:152–53). Emerson confesses
to feeling some shame before the workers on whom he has to depend
for commodities and material comfort. He feels inadequate when
confronting the practical abilities of his ploughman, woodchopper, or
cook. They “have got the education, I only the commodity”; they have
“some sort of self-sufficiency,” while he must endure his continuing
dependence on them (CW 1:150). All this sounds remarkably like
the master-slave relationship to which Hegel devoted some of his
most interesting pages.31 In Hegel’s view, the master is ultimately
reduced to inauthenticity and self-emptiness precisely because his
continuing dependence on his bondman has denied him the moral
and spiritual education inherent in labor. The bondman, by contrast,
achieves authentic individuality through his work. Labor not only
enables him practically but also leads to self-discovery because his
spirit reveals itself in the transformative effect that his labor has upon
his material environment. In the products of his labor the bondman
thus encounters his objectified self and achieves a degree of self-
knowledge denied to the master. Though Emerson did not go so far as
to accept this dramatic Hegelian reversal in the spiritual relationship
31. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 146–50.

Self-Realization 83
between master and bondman, he was as convinced as Hegel that

work was indispensable to self-realization: “The distinction and end
of a soundly constituted man is his labor. Use is inscribed on all his
faculties. Use is the end to which he exists” (W 11:542).32
Emerson also recognized that the importance of human endeavor
resides in striving itself rather than in any goal striven for. From the
late eighteenth century onward the human’s perpetual incompleteness
ceased to be regarded as a tragic limitation. The summum bonum was
no longer a final state of perfection but an endless striving toward an
ever-unattainable goal, a Streben nach dem Unendlichen. For Hölderlin’s
Hyperion, human excellence and grandeur consist in endless aspira-
tion: “Das ist die Herrlichkeit des Menschen, daß ihm ewig nichts
genügt” (“That is the glory of man, that nothing ever satisfies him”).33
The supreme expression of this idea is Goethe’s Faust, which Emerson
considered “the most remarkable literary work of the age” (W 10:328).
Somewhat earlier Lessing made the famous statement that if God were
to offer him a choice between the possession of truth and an insatiable
desire for truth, he would choose the latter, even if this meant that he
would err forever. Possession of truth, Lessing says, would produce
inertia, stagnation, and pride, whereas the search for truth involves a
never-ending development of human abilities and powers, which is
the only “perfecting” accessible to humans.34
For Emerson also, “truth” resides in the effort to attain it, not in
the illusion of possessing it. The only way to be “a candidate for
truth” is to avoid that illusion and the spiritual “repose” it implies.
Emerson makes the value of striving most obvious when he con-
trasts truth not with untruth, but with repose: “God offers to every
mind its choice between truth and repose.” Only by pursuing truth
can we respect “the highest law of [our] being,” because only thus
can we develop our noblest human faculties (CW 2:202). Searching
for truth is always a moral obligation, but by stressing that truth is
forever unattainable, Emerson puts the focus on striving itself; on
account of the moral demands and benefits inherent in striving, he
32. For a detailed discussion of Emerson’s “doctrine of use,” see Michael Lopez,
Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century, 53–105.
33. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperions Jugend, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 1:524.
34. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Eine Duplik, Werke, 8:32–33.
rightly considers the search for truth to be an integral part of his self-
realizationist ethic.
In addition to harmony, Emerson the metaethical intuitionist per-

ceived a second absolute value inherent in the Self, and therefore also
to be pursued by the finite self: universality. As indicated in chapter 2,
the concept of universality played a role of the utmost importance
in the moral thought of Emerson’s day. Kant—for whom universality
was an Idea of the Reason since it is not derivable from experience—
held that only principles open to universalization are morally valid.
The best known among his formulations of the categorical imperative
reads: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same
time will that it should become a universal law.” This commitment to
universality is reemphasized when Kant, regarding nature as a perfect
model of universal lawfulness, reformulates thus: “So act as if the
maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal
law of nature.”35 If a maxim fails the test of universalizability, or if it self-
destructs when universalized, it cannot be a morally valid principle of
action. An eighteenth-century planter may have been guided by the
maxim that slavery is right. Universalization of this maxim, however,
would lead to universal slavery, including the enslavement of the
planter aristocracy. Apart from the maxim’s not being universalizable
on purely logical grounds (if all are slaves, nobody would be a slave
since there would be no enslavers), there is the obvious fact that
no planter could rationally will (given the consequences for himself)
that his maxim would become a universal law. Hence his maxim is
incompatible with morality.
Whereas Kant regarded universalizability as primarily a criterion
of moral judgment, Hegel considered it a test of the self’s capacity for
growth, for development beyond the particular so as to encompass the
universal. Hegel was not satisfied with a universality that was such only
by virtue of its complete indeterminacy and consequent emptiness.
He wanted a concrete universality—a universality achieving concrete-
ness in the individual who had risen above mere particularity. The
individual is called upon to translate the self-realizationist urge of
35. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:421; by
“maxim” Kant here means “a subjective principle of action”—420n.
Self-Realization 85
universal Spirit (Geist) into concrete experience and thus to become the
means of the Spirit’s self-realization. Allen Wood clarifies the intimate
interrelationship between individual and universal:
The human spirit forms different conceptions of itself at different

times and places. But Hegel views these conceptions as stages of
a single process, a series of attempts to grasp and actualize the
nature of spirit. The process is progressive; spirit raises itself from
less adequate conceptions of itself to more adequate ones.36
The ultimate goal, as we learn from the concluding chapter of the

Phenomenology of Spirit, is the complete self-realization of universal
Spirit, that is, the completion of the process sketched by Wood and
the raising of the entire process and all its stages (the less adequate
conceptions never having been discarded: they were aufgehoben, i.e.,
annulled yet preserved in a higher form)37 to the level of absolute
Spiritual self-knowledge.
Emerson’s ethics incorporates both the Kantian criterial and the
Hegelian self-realizationist conception of universality. There is no
evidence that Emerson knew Hegel’s work in sufficient detail early
enough for it to have had any direct formative influence on him. Nev-
ertheless, one might argue that the Hegelian paradigm is finally more
helpful than the Kantian in one’s attempts to make sense of Emerson’s
theory of universality. Unlike Kant, both Emerson and Hegel were
committed to a self-realizationist ethic. Unlike Kant, moreover, both
Emerson and Hegel were pantheists, and their pantheism enabled
them to view universality as something more pervasive and vital than
Kant’s universality, which was, more strictly, a formal principle in
logic.38 Unlike Kant, finally, both Emerson and Hegel were deeply
committed to a view of Spirit, God, Mind, or Reality as evolving and
developing, as endlessly involved in process. For all these reasons,
Hegel articulated—and he did so with unmatched richness and pro-
fundity of argument—a view of universality more in tune with Emer-
son’s Romantic sensibility, and more relevant to Emerson’s ethical
thinking.
36. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 203.

37. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 90.
38. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 70/B 95.
Emerson invariably objects to particularity, or mere individuality, as
precluding the self’s higher development and, therefore, as ethically
unacceptable. The human being in his or her particularity cannot help
falling into morally unjustifiable egoism:
All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in
the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and
individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation
in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the
private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the
law of universal being. (CW 1:104)
Particularity leads to egoism and evil, but as Emerson’s phrase “in

the abstract” indicates, the universality he refers to here is an empty
concept, an idea that stands in need of concrete realization (as so
often in his prose, Emerson here exploits a key term’s etymological
implications: “abstract,” cf. Latin abstractus, drawn away, withdrawn,
removed, detached from—specifically in this context, from anything at
all corresponding to human experience). As humans we cannot return
to the state of “all men, in the abstract” since our “incarnation in a
private self” is an inescapable fact of our humanity. The only course
open to us is to rise above particularity by attempting to make the
universal concrete within our experience. Put differently, universality
as conceptual abstraction has to be translated into universality as
concrete experience, and this can be accomplished only through the
individual who realizes in consciousness the universality that we all
share “in the abstract”:
There are two facts, the Individual and the Universal. To this
belong the finite, the temporal, ignorance, sin, death; to that
belong the infinite, the immutable, truth, goodness, life. In Man
they both consist. The All is in Man. In Man the perpetual progress
is from the Individual to the Universal. (JMN 5:229)
The true universal, therefore, is not a concept separate from the

individual. The individual contains universality: “All is in Each” (JMN
5:136).39 The individual is, one might say in Hegelian language, a
concrete universal: universality is the to-be-realized essence of the
39. For the Goethean and pantheist context of this idea, see my Emerson’s Modernity
and the Example of Goethe, 51–54.
Self-Realization 87
individual, who embodies the concept of universality in its dialectical

tension with particularity. In the very attempt to make the universal
real, the individual rises above particularity: “Man helps himself by
larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize . . .
to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic
sense.” Only by “ascending out of his limits into a catholic existence”
can the human escape from the “poor empirical pretensions” that
constitute particularity (CW 4:104, 20; 3:135). In fact, “the height of
culture . . . consists in the identification of the Ego with the universe”
(W 12:62). Even goodness itself is such only by virtue of its being
guided by “universal insights” and its being productive of “results that
are of universal application” (JMN 8:235).
The claim that “universal insights” are determinative of goodness
brings Emerson very close to a Kantian categorical imperative. He
expresses himself repeatedly in ways that clearly echo the categorical
imperative, and he sometimes explicitly notes his affiliation with Kant,
as when he writes: “Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends.
He is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral,—we say
it with Marcus Aurelius and with Kant,—whose aim or motive may
become a universal rule, binding on all intelligent beings” (W 10:92).
Emerson’s associating Marcus Aurelius with Kant is careless, for there
is nothing in Marcus Aurelius anticipating the categorical-imperative
idea expressed in the last-quoted sentence. The first two sentences
of the quotation are relatable to the general Stoic notion that one’s
rational nature demands one to live in accordance with the divine logos
as one finds it expressed in the rationally ordered universe. Perhaps
Emerson had in mind an Aurelian statement such as this:
This must always be borne in mind, what is the Nature of the

whole Universe, and what mine, and how this stands in relation
to that, being too what sort of a part of what sort of a whole; and
that no one can prevent thee from doing and saying always what
is in keeping with the Nature of which thou art a part.40
In any case, one should not judge Emerson’s confusion too harshly:
there are some obvious points of contact between Kant’s thought
and Stoicism, and a few scholars have even argued for a significant
40. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, To Himself, translated by C. R. Haines (Loeb Clas-

sical Library), 2.9.
Kantian debt to the Stoics, although such claims are now generally
dismissed.
Emerson is on surer ground elsewhere: “What is moral? It is the re-
specting in action catholic or universal ends. Hear the definition which
Kant gives of moral conduct: ‘Act always so that the immediate motive
of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings’ ”
(W 7:27). As René Wellek pointed out, such explicit acknowledgments
of Kant as formulator of the categorical imperative appear rather late
in Emerson’s career (the passages just quoted date from the 1860s).41
There are, however, indications that Emerson had been long familiar
with the categorical imperative. His first exposure to the idea probably
came through Coleridge’s The Friend, which he was reading “with great
interest” as early as December 1829 (L 7:188). Coleridge not only
provided an excellent statement of the categorical imperative but high-
lighted it by calling it “the one universal and sufficient principle and
guide of morality”: “So act that thou mayest be able, without involving
any contradiction, to will that the maxim of thy conduct should be
the law of all intelligent Beings.”42 It is clearly in the spirit of the
categorical imperative that Emerson argues, in an 1831 sermon, against
indifference to the Sabbath; the Sabbath-breaker, surely, mindful of
“the evils that would ensue,” cannot will that “all men should do as he
does and so the day be abolished” (CS 3:165). The categorical character
of moral obligation thus precludes the possibility of exceptions and
of merely subjective moral principles. The categorical imperative, after
all, makes the moral validity of principles of action dependent upon their
universalizability. In sum, “Virtue is the adoption of [the] dictate of
the Universal mind by the individual Will” (EL 2:84).
Needless to say, for the individual the pursuit of universality is
what Emerson, in another context, calls “a perpetual inchoation”
(CW 1:124). As shown above, only in the individual can univer-
sality achieve realization. However, no human can escape from the
defects and finiteness inherent in individuality. The individual is thus
necessarily both the realizer and the obstructer of universality. Since
Emerson often stressed the analogy of goodness and beauty, one may
illustrate with an example from his aesthetics. Contemplating the
41. Wellek, Confrontations, 194.

42. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, 1:194.
Self-Realization 89
greatest artistic and literary achievements, we should try to see what

“man was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if
you will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias,
of Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment
wrought” (CW 2:63). “Man” is an abstract, empty universal that
achieves concreteness and reality only in the individual—in Phidias,
Dante, Shakespeare, or whoever. The literary and artistic potential of
universal “man” finds but limited and defective expression in works
that bear the marks of their authors’ temperamental flaws, stylistic
obsessions, errors in judgment, prejudices, and similar limitations
inherent in individuality. Without individuals such as Phidias, Dante,
and Shakespeare, however, the universal would never achieve even
partial realization, would never become a concrete universal. Though
“obstructing” the universal, the great work of art is at the same time
its limited realization. Emerson makes a similar point when he says
that Plato’s philosophical achievement “stands between the truth and
every man’s mind” (CW 4:26). Platonic philosophy, obviously, is an
expression of Plato’s insights into and interpretations of “the truth.”
This does not mean, however, that “the truth” would ever have been
concretely available except through the limited expression of it in the
thought of thinkers such as Plato. Plato “obstructs” abstract truth in the
very act of expressing it and making it concrete. But such concretization
is the only way of giving us (albeit partial) access to truth. Emerson
recognizes this when he says that it is “impossible to think on certain
levels, except through [Plato]” (CW 4:26).
True universality, therefore, is not available to the finite self, but
pursuing it remains a self-realizationist imperative and thus a moral
obligation. We keep “demand[ing] of men a . . . universality we do
not find.” Their failure does not, however, absolve us from our own
duty ever to “press . . . onward to the impersonal and illimitable”
(CW 1:122; 2:186).
4
Others
S elf-realization is inconceivable without the existence and involve-

ment of others. The very notion of “self” depends upon the
contrastive notion “other,” and one achieves self-identification only
through awareness of the otherness of others. Moreover, as Aristotle
recognized when he made ethics part of politics, one cannot achieve
maturity as a human being without rational participation in the life
of the polis, the larger structured community: “He who is incapable of
living in society, or has no need to because he is self-sufficient, must
be either a beast or a god.”1 The education of the will, the building
of character, intellectual development, and cultural enrichment all
presuppose interactive involvement with one’s fellow humans. On
these grounds Michael Lopez is certainly right when claiming that
Emerson views “our social selves as . . . the necessary foundation for
our identity and for our capacities for action.”2 There is, furthermore,
a whole range of human emotions that come fully into play only
in relation to other humans. One can certainly “love” a landscape,
for instance, or “love” one’s dog, but such “love” lacks the challenge,
mutuality, and inexhaustibility characteristic of love between two hu-
mans at its best. Without positive emotions directed at fellow human
beings—emotions such as love, friendship, affection, and sympathy—
no one can be said to be truly human. Self-realization, in sum, has an
inescapably relational dimension.
Involvement in society also means that one inevitably lives much of
one’s life in a public space, and as a result one’s sense of one’s identity
also depends to a high degree on what one is perceived to be. Among
1. Aristotle, Politics 1.2.

2. Lopez, Emerson and Power, 76.
90
Others 91
Emerson’s older contemporaries it was especially Hegel who stressed

the importance of recognition to the making of identity. One cannot
achieve real self-consciousness, in Hegel’s view, without one’s being
recognized as a true self by others and without one’s absorbing that
recognition into one’s self-reflection; moreover, the value of others
as recognizers of one’s true self depends upon one’s granting them
equal recognition as true selves. Such recognition became crucial in
the age of Hegel and Emerson because institutions and hierarchies
were no longer capable of “granting” identity by virtue of a person’s
place (class, rank, family) in the social structure. As Stanley Cavell
sees it, modern self-directed skepticism is a response to or expression
of “the dependence of the human self on society for its definition,
but at the same time its transcendence of that definition, its infinite
insecurity in maintaining its existence.” The post-Enlightenment, post-
Revolutionary age was, in Emerson’s words, “the age of severance, of
dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for
himself. . . . There is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments once
supposed essential to civil society. The new race . . . are fanatics in free-
dom” (W 10:326–27). In such an atomistic environment, meaningful
identity was no longer a social given, but something to be struggled for,
something to be acquired and made real to oneself in part by making
it accepted as such by others. Hence the modern stress on the need for
mutual recognition and for such ethical components of recognition as
acknowledgment of the intrinsic dignity of everyone as a human being
and respect for everyone as an individual entitled, as fully as oneself, to
autonomy and to the pursuit of his or her particular kind of integrity.
The concept of “respect for persons” or “dignity of persons,” much
discussed in modern ethics, received its first authoritative expression
in Kant’s most moving formulation of the categorical imperative: “So
act as to treat humanity, both in your own person and in the person
of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a
means.”3
3. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 141–50. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 174.
On the need for recognition, see Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 43–53.
“Acknowledgment” plays a key role in the thought and literary criticism of Stanley
Cavell; see especially The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy,
329–496, and Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. Kant, Grundlegung zur
Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:429.
Respect for the individuality, independence, and dignity of others
is the dominant principle of Emerson’s ethics in its other-regarding
aspects. Unconditionally committed to the integrity of the self, Emer-
son quite naturally made concern for the selfhood of every person
the criterion by which to judge attitudes and actions toward them.
He recognized the inescapable moral implication of one’s self in
the selfhood of others: preserving the moral integrity of one’s self
precludes one’s violating the integrity of any other self. By thus uni-
versalizing the rights of the self and giving them primacy, he attempted
to solve what Anders Hallengren identifies as “the central problem . . .
to which Emerson the moralist had to find an answer”: how can one
reconcile the demands of the self with the demands of others? How
can one reconcile, in other words, the self’s absolute commitment
to its own integrity and authenticity with the demands of justice
and fairness toward others?4 Resolving the conflicts implied in such
questions necessitated, according to Emerson, a deeper understanding
of the true needs of the self and a realization that the moral agent
advantages the self of others in the very act of asserting the rights of
his or her self.
The Christ of the Divinity School “Address” provides Emerson with
an excellent example. By virtue of being true to himself, he was true to
the self of others. Though respecting Moses and the prophets, he felt
“no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations . . . to the
eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man” (CW 1:81).
Christ knew, as Emerson puts it elsewhere, that “Heaven deals with
us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles”
(W 6:214). He therefore located the moral law within each of us
and stressed individual responsibility: “Having seen that the law in
us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded.” Any
externally imposed command Christ considered incompatible with
human dignity, and for this reason he deserves to be regarded as “the
only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man.” Christ,
in other words, was as just to others as he was to himself. By obeying
the moral law within, he achieved true human dignity; by his example
he inspires each of us to “dare, and live after the infinite Law that is
4. Hallengren, The Code of Concord, 115.

Others 93
in [us].” True Christianity—that is, a Christianity faithful to the spirit

of Christ’s teaching as interpreted by Emerson—does not require us
to “subordinate [our] nature to Christ’s nature” because that not only
would violate our selfhood but by the same token would turn Christ,
“the friend of man,” into an oppressive “eastern monarch”—a role
that would obviously destroy his moral integrity (CW 1:81–82). True
Christianity does not, therefore, demand faith in Christ. It does insist
that we have “the faith of Christ,” that is, “a faith like Christ’s in the
infinitude of man” (CW 1:85, 89; emphasis added).
The example of Christ also brings into focus Emerson’s entire ethics
of influence. The only acceptable kind of influence is one that provokes
those subjected to it to resist it, thereby stimulating them to actualize
their latent originality. Influence thus conceived provokes them to be
all the more emphatically themselves. Nothing valuable can be “given”
us, as Goethe’s Faust knew so well.5 In his sermons Emerson inculcated
“the everlasting truth that the only good that any man can obtain he
must get by the cultivation of himself” (CS 4:150). Influence conceived
as provocation also shapes Emerson’s argument in “The American
Scholar.” Books should neither instruct nor indoctrinate: “They are
for nothing but to inspire.” Indeed, “I had better never see a book than
to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a
satellite instead of a system” (CW 1:56).
Emerson’s overriding concern with the integrity of the self (“Noth-
ing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”—CW 2:30)
thus severely limits the concept of influence as generally understood.
Any attempt to shape another’s destiny, to prescribe his course, or to
make him over in one’s own image undermines the integrity of both
the influencer and the person influenced: “Whenever I find my do-
minion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction
of [another] also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to
him. . . . it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me” (CW 3:125). A
parent desiring “that his child should repeat his character and fortune”
not only fails to respect the child as a human being sui generis but
demeans himself by “a low self-love” (W 10:137). Emerson himself,
5. “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen” (“What
you have inherited from your fathers, you need to make your own, in order to gain
possession of it”)—Faust, pt. 1, 682–83.
as is well known, had no wish to degrade his auditors or readers to
the level of discipleship; he regarded it as evidence of his integrity as
a thinker that his thought had repelled potential disciples:
I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for
twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not
that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent
receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring
men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from
me. . . . This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I
should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did
not create independence. (JMN 14:258)
Influence, as conceived by Emerson, liberates men and women by forc-

ing them back upon their own resources of thought and inspiration
and thus challenging them to break out of the prison of conventional
or routine thinking and acting.
True influence, in sum, is a matter of “form” rather than “content.”
The influencer is valuable not on account of any ideas he advances,
but because he sets an example of original thinking and acting by
daring to think his own thoughts and to live in accordance with them.
One should not accept his ideas, lest one fail to think one’s own,
but his example can stimulate one to do precisely that. Formally,
every example of “mental and moral force is a positive good” because
one “cannot even hear of [it] . . . without fresh resolution” (CW 4:8–
9). Emerson’s thinking of true influence as formal is also related to
his limited respect for historical factuality. It is only as “form” that
qualities or virtues are perpetually relevant, whereas their realized
“content” is inevitably time-bound—that is, subject to limitations on
phenomenal, cultural, and personal grounds and, in any case, remote
from the concerns of the Now. Hence Emerson’s statement: “Although
the commands of the Conscience are essentially absolute, they are
historically limitary” (CW 1:188). Courage, for instance, is always in
demand, but the specific courage displayed by Martin Luther at the
Diet of Worms is not. Consequently, his influence on us should be
formal only. We should be as courageous as he was, but in ways that
are truly our own and concerning matters of crucial importance to us.
Similarly, Kant may inspire us to a self-reliance as uncompromising
as his, but being self-reliant in the manner of Kant would involve an
Others 95
imitation so slavish as to amount to an abdication of the rights of the

self and would, therefore, be oxymoronically absurd.
Questions concerning benevolence, charity, and philanthropy con-

stitute another important preoccupation of Emerson’s other-regarding
ethics. He insists that moral goodness needs to be other-directed. It is
inherent in “man’s natural goodness . . . to do good to others” (JMN
3:174). Paralleling the claims made for the primacy of the practical
Reason (see chapter 2), Emerson maintains that the highest kind of
wisdom is practical wisdom, moral wisdom, or, in his words, “an
operative wisdom, a wisdom of good works” (CS 1:131). Striving to
attain this wisdom, which “is the end and perfection of the character”
(CS 1:131), is our highest duty within the purview of other-regarding
ethics. True benevolence, true charity (“what is charity but wisdom of
good works?”—CS 1:132) is an obligation, the fulfillment of which
helps us attain our moral destiny as social beings. Emerson’s com-
mitment to ethics even during his years of most intense religious
involvement emerges in his desire to establish the law of benevolence
on a foundation more universal than that of Christian agape. As he
puts it in an 1830 sermon: “It is an exaggeration to say that Christianity
first taught the law of benevolence. God taught it to the first man,
and to every man in the Constitution of his own mind, and in the
Constitution of society. . . . It is an universal sentiment” (CS 2:196).
The last words (“universal sentiment”) in this passage are symp-
tomatic of Emerson’s affiliation with what Norman Fiering calls the
Shaftesbury-Hutcheson gospel, which made feeling (sentiment, sym-
pathy, the “affections”) the chief modality of the moral life and the
basis of a benevolism and humanitarianism extended to all living
things.6 Although, as already indicated, the “rational” moral sense of
Reid and Stewart was in all probability more attractive to the Amer-
ican Unitarians than the “sentimental” moral sense of Shaftesbury
and Hutcheson, the “benevolent affections” nevertheless, as Howe
points out, “played a crucial role” in Unitarian thought, and especially
Hutcheson’s description of them was “greatly admired.”7 Emerson
often sounds very much like a Hutchesonian. The art of living consists
6. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 356–57.

7. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 48–49, 58–59.
primarily in being a “man of benevolent affections” (CS 3:46). It is
“the glory of the human soul to embrace . . . all men in its affection.”
The “benevolent man feels” for others; he “sympathizes” with his fel-
low humans (CS 3:47). Benevolent affection “begins with the nearest
relation and reaches to the farthest. It dictates our intercourse at the
fireside and it reaches our conduct to our country, to other nations,
and to the brute creation” (CS 3:89). Emerson’s allegiance to univer-
sal benevolism also emerges in his repeated echoing of Hutcheson’s
anticipation of the central Utilitarian tenet (the greatest happiness of
the greatest number). In an 1831 sermon Emerson considers it “our
great duty . . . not to live to ourselves but to the greatest good of the
greatest number of our fellow beings” (CS 3:200; also CS 2:197; 3:43).
As one might expect, Emerson is deeply concerned about the integ-
rity-as-persons of those made interdependent by the very structure of
beneficence, to wit, the benefactor and the beneficiary. As far as the
benefactor is concerned, it was a commonplace of eighteenth-century
ethics to speak of the necessary balance between self-love and love
for others.8 Although self-love (also called “interest” or “prudence”)
had to be kept within strict limits and was not in itself considered
a basis of virtue, it was regarded as a necessary factor in human
personality and as a tendency that could be made to harmonize with or
to subserve the duty of benevolence. For eighteenth-century moralists,
self-love had thus primarily instrumental value. Toward the end of
the century, Kant considered both the intrinsic and the instrumental
value of self-love when he pointed out that the maxim that one should
completely sacrifice one’s happiness or possessions for the benefit of
others is proven to be self-contradictory when subjected to the test of
universalization (and therefore to be morally unacceptable), but also
that this maxim, if acted upon, would preclude a person’s continued
benefaction.9
Emerson built upon such eighteenth-century views. He recognized
that “true success in life consists in striking the mean between the
love of self and of our neighbor. . . . [A] man has a good deal to do in
the world for himself before others . . . which, if he refuses to do for
8. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 158.

9. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Tugendlehre, “Einleitung” 8.2; §31, Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, 6:393, 454.
Others 97
himself, he will not be able to do for any body else” (CS 2:132).
He also repeatedly stressed that self-love can be harmonized with
benevolence and that the self is often the chief beneficiary of its
other-directed goodness. Humans should realize that “Charity . . . is
necessary to their own happiness,” that “he who withholds his aid
from his fellowmen is more a loser than his fellowman from whom
he withholds it,” and that man advances “the perfection of his being”
by imparting “his knowledge, his virtue, his possessions, his goodwill”
(CS 2:197). Benevolence can thus easily be construed as a duty one
owes to oneself. It is, in fact, “an indispensable part of a finished
character to comply with the law of charity” (CS 3:86). A morally
advanced person realizes that justice and fairness to others are inspired
not by “selfish calculation” or “prudence” but by “a necessity to the
soul of the agent” (CW 1:214).
Emerson’s concern with the integrity of the agent is even more
obvious when he considers that integrity threatened by the demands
of others. He cites with approval a saying he attributes to Socrates,
that “the gods prefer integrity to charity” (CS 4:174). What provokes
him above all are attempts to turn the duty of charity into a tool of
moral pressure and social conformity. In the well-known words of
“Self-Reliance”:
Do not tell me . . . of my obligation to put all poor men in good

situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philan-
thropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such
men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. . . .
Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the
dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the
manhood to withhold. (CW 2: 30–31)
It is a wicked dollar because giving it did not result from a sense of

duty to “persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and
sold” (CW 2:31). Giving induced by conformity to dictates alien to
the self amounts to a violation of self. As Nietzsche pointed out, often
the real incentive for almsgiving is not compassion but cowardice.10
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches 2.2.239–40, Sämtliche

Werke, 2:660. For Emerson’s significant anticipations of and influence on Nietzsche’s
other-regarding ethics, see my “Areteic Ethics: Emerson and Nietzsche on Pity,
This argument represents one of several Emersonian attempts to
redefine the nature and content of giving. He came to regard benev-
olence as a total commitment of self rather than as a series of good
deeds, which are often no more than an excuse for one’s failure to truly
commit the self to the benefit of others. One has to be totally engagé:
“Generosity does not consist in giving money or money’s worth. These
so-called goods are only the shadow of good. . . . We owe to man higher
succors than food and fire. We owe to man man” (W 7:114–15). But
in order to make this gift of self as valuable as possible, the giver needs
first to “enrich” himself. We can truly serve others only by serving our-
selves first, that is, by making ourselves better, nobler human beings.
Thus the person who faithfully does his own work “helps society at
large with somewhat more of certainty than he who devotes himself
to charities” (W 7:141). No one, Emerson believes, exemplified this
principle more successfully than Goethe. “The true charity of Goethe”
did not consist in “his donations and good deeds,” but in his having
spent a fortune on self-culture, on his lifelong devotion to Bildung. It is
obvious that Goethe’s achievement has done more for humanity than
has any “amount of subscription to soup-societies” (CW 3:60–61). As
Emerson explains in “Uses of Great Men,”
If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it
the full price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better
nor worse; but all mental and moral force is a positive good. It
goes out from you, whether you will or not, and profits me whom
you never thought of. (CW 4:8–9)
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra expresses both the richness of the true self and
its higher mode of giving through a beautiful paradox: “I give no alms.
For that I am not poor enough.”11
Emerson’s insistence on the benefactor’s total commitment of self
was also aimed at preventing benevolence from becoming a mere
Friendship, and Love.” Stanley Cavell provides an important and wide-ranging defense,
on grounds different from mine, of Emerson’s position as expressed in the passage
quoted from “Self-Reliance”; see Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution
of Emersonian Perfectionism, 134–38; also Cavell, The Senses of “Walden,” 153–54, 157.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, “Zarathustra’s Vorrede” 2, Sämtliche
Werke, 4:13.
Others 99
abstraction and the agent from becoming a merely theoretical bene-

factor. Hegel urged that we take seriously the word “neighbour” in the
commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus
19:18; Matthew 22:39). If interpreted as commanding love toward
all, the commandment would deny love a real, concrete content; it
would turn love into an empty concept (ein Abstraktum). In fact, it
would turn “love” into the opposite of real love (zum Gegenteil der
wirklichen Liebe).12 Emerson agreed that such generalized “love” not
only would destroy the benefactor’s integrity or authenticity but also
would invite hypocrisy: the abstraction would become a substitute
for concrete realization and a cloak for indifference, selfishness, or
even exploitation. No matter how sincere his allegiance to universal
benevolism, Emerson also recognized that in practical terms benev-
olence was both local and specific: “It is in being good to wife &
children & servants that the kingdom of heaven begins” (JMN 4:41).
He was always skeptical about the sincerity of those committed to a
generalized, “faraway” benevolence:
If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?
If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and
comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I
not say to him, “Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be
good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your
hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for
black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.”
(CW 2:30)
Emerson here points to a moral defect or blind spot to which self-

proclaimed humanitarians seem particularly susceptible, in our day
as well as in his. Its paradigmatic exemplar is Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who with fervent eloquence advocated love of humankind but who
abandoned each of his five children to a foundling home. Charles
Dickens, in his inimitable way, labeled this kind of humanitarianism
“Telescopic Philanthropy.”13
12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion,
Werke, 17:283.
13. For Rousseau’s enthusiasm for universal love, see, for instance, Émile ou de
l’éducation, 62, 266; Dickens, Bleak House, ch. 4, title.
The integrity of the beneficiary is, needless to say, as important as
that of the benefactor. The proper attitude toward the former is already
implied in much of what precedes concerning the latter. Here also,
the essential criterion is respect for personhood and individuality.
Emerson regards benevolence as not really directed at what is weak
and pitiful in others. True benevolence is love rather than pity—love
for the human being underneath the misery or poverty. It attempts
to remove misery and poverty because they impede the attainment of
full humanity. Poverty must be attacked because one of its “greatest
evils” is “the privation of many of the best aspects of human nature”
(CS 2:200). Similarly, “if [a man] is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited
and odious, it is because there is so much of his nature which is
unlawfully withholden from him.” Benevolence should attempt to free
him from “this his prison” and restore to him the humanity that is
lawfully his (W 7:115). This principle informs Emerson’s advice to the
1838 graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. Referring to future
parishioners, he entreats each graduate: “[L]et their timid aspirations
find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted
out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted,
and their wonder feel that you have wondered” (CW 1:90). This kind
of “giving” enhances the benefactor without offending the beneficiary.
Emerson’s interpretation of giving as restoring to the beneficiary
something that is lawfully his or hers is an expression of his acute
awareness that giving as traditionally understood undermines the
respect owed the beneficiary by virtue of his or her personhood. Such
giving is presumptuous and insulting: “It is not the office of a man
to receive gifts. How dare you give them?” True giving, by contrast,
involves sharing our common humanness: “The gift, to be true, must
be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing
unto him.” Or stated in a fine paradox, whereas “we do not quite
forgive a giver . . . any one who assumes to bestow,” we “can receive
anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves”
(CW 3:94–95). This concern with the integrity of the beneficiary also
emerges in Emerson’s insistence that the ideal gift is a useless one. His
favorite example of such a gift is flowers because they represent, above
all, beauty, which is a value sui generis and therefore untranslatable
into any other value system. In other words, since the essential role
of flowers is to embody beauty and since beauty eclipses utilitarian
Others 101
values, flowers are essentially useless. They express the “proud assertion
that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world” (CW 3:93).
Their very “uselessness” precludes giver and recipient standing in a
false relation to each other. As already indicated, bestowing benefits
is presumptuous; receiving them violates our deepest wish “to be self-
sustained.” Hence, “the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for gifts”
(CW 3:94–95).
Another important aspect of Emerson’s other-regarding ethics con-

cerns the individual’s attitudes and relations to others as members of
organized society and its various component structures—for instance,
as citizens of a state, supporters of a political party, adherents of a
reform movement. Since Emerson holds that commitment to a group
and to what it stands for involves abdication of individuality, he
regards the state, a political party, or a social movement as a homog-
enizing entity that the individual actually or spiritually has to remain
separate from if he or she wishes to safeguard his or her integrity.
Emerson finds it difficult to give substance to humans as part of a
larger societal structure. He thinks in terms of the individual (concrete,
true, real) versus the state, organization, or movement (abstract, unau-
thentic, only phenomenal), and he measures the individual’s worth
by the degree of his or her opposition to the group. On this point
Emerson is in full agreement with his admired Montaigne, to whom,
as Hugo Friedrich said, “the best thing about man is the part that strives
against seizure by society.”14 Embracing the group and its values is
fatal to personhood, as Emerson indicates when he considers Wendell
Phillips to have “only a platform-existence, & no personality.” People
like Phillips are “mere mouthpieces of a party, take away the party &
they shrivel & vanish” (JMN 13:281–82). Even Emerson’s theory of the
family does not envision a unity involving the partial submergence of
individuality; instead it advocates “proximities” of absolute individ-
uals (CW 2:41–42). But since one’s self-definition and worth depend
upon one’s opposition to societal structures, Emerson cannot treat
the individual in isolation from them. As a result, abstractions such as
“the state” and “society” play a significant part in his other-regarding
ethics.
14. Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, 249.

The value distinction inherent in this argument—the superiority
of the individual to society—expresses a fundamental Emersonian
conviction. What Lockridge says about the British Romantics is true
also of Emerson. Like them, he “insist[ed] on the ontological priority
of the moral to the social.”15 He took this position as soon as he began
to formulate his reflections on ethical, social, and political matters.
Mary Kupiec Cayton reminds us that as a Harvard student Emerson
had already resolved to “survey the political condition of the world
as ethics[;] discover the Lex legum [law of laws] on which legislation
is to proceed” (JMN 1:254).16 And since morality is available only
through individual consciousness and conscience, the individual has
the duty to evaluate and delimit the claims of society in the light of
his or her moral insights. Politically, this is a potentially anarchical
tenet: society and the state have legitimacy only to the degree that
they express values that accord with my moral convictions; as a moral
being I have the duty to undermine institutions or contravene laws
that do not answer to the demands of my conscience; indeed, the only
acceptable social system is one re-created in my image as a moral being.
Every reader of Emerson (and Thoreau) is familiar with such claims,
both explicit and implicit. Their informing principle is the absolute
supremacy of the moral sentiment: “Wherever the sentiment of right
comes in, it takes precedence of everything else” (CW 4:53).
The individual does have some constructive obligations to society.
Since only the individual can be ethical, since only he or she can
enact the commands of the moral sentiment, no societal system or
structure—which, as indicated above, is inconceivable without the
members’ abdication of true individuality—has any lasting moral
validity. In Emerson’s words, “the permanent good is for the soul
only & cannot be retained in any society or system” (JMN 10:328).
As David Robinson points out, Emerson holds that “it is individ-
uals and their particular lives that finally constitute the texture of
social life, and the only sphere of moral action.”17 Whatever good
is to be found in a society results from the degree to which true
individuals have been able to make their moral insights momentarily

16. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation
of New England, 1800–1845, 40.
17. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 73.
Others 103
prevail—momentarily, because society’s inherent anti-individualism

and predilection for expediency will soon render the moral influence
ineffectual. The individual’s duty, therefore, is to keep confronting and
challenging society with his or her moral insights. Each of us has the
obligation to pay his or her “debt of thought to mankind,” to shake
society out of the “repose” that is fatal to truth, and to “introduce
moral truths into the general mind” (CW 2:187, 202; 4:12). This is
the duty of “Man Thinking,” as described in “The American Scholar,”
and of the ideal clergyman Emerson calls for in the Divinity School
“Address.” It will also be the duty of the true reformers whom Emerson
envisions, the “men and women who shall renovate life and our social
state” (CW 2:43).
Emerson was less enthusiastic, to be sure, about the actual reformers
and the numerous reform movements he observed around him. He
found that most reformers had become the fanatic slaves of their
own ideology and as a result had lost the human dignity inherent
in spiritual independence. They are “narrow, self-pleasing, conceited
men, and affect us as the insane do.” Instead of appealing to “the
sentiment of man,” the conscience, or the individual’s innate sense
of decency, they rely on “personal and party heats . . . measureless
exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure
to justice and truth” (CW 1:176). Moreover, by its very nature a
reform movement, like a political party or the state, sacrifices the
independence of its members to its cause or platform. It can mobilize
its forces only by “degrad[ing] . . . man to a measure” (CW 1:177).
It is thus in obvious violation of the respect-for-persons principle
expressed in the formulation of the categorical imperative quoted near
the beginning of this chapter. Not surprisingly, Emerson concludes,
perhaps somewhat smugly, that “the superior mind will find itself
equally at odds with the evils of society, and with the projects that are
offered to relieve them” (CW 4:97).
The only kind of reformers Emerson can accept at all are those
whom, in the first of his “Lectures on the Times,” he refers to as “the stu-
dents” (CW 1:172, 179), that is, the contemplators of the ideal, whose
inaction results from “a scorn of inadequate action” (CW 1:180).
Emerson’s preferring “the students” to “the actors” (CW 1:172) is in
line with his general tendency to privilege principle over action, as
discussed in the preceding chapter. The students look “with faith to a
fair Future” and do not profane their vision “by rash and unequal
attempts to realize it.” In the midst of “the dwarfish Actual,” they
represent “the exorbitant Idea.” But the “new modes of thinking” they
inspire cannot fail of their ultimately renewing effect upon society
(CW 1:180–81). The students thus represent Emerson’s conviction
that thought is the most powerful agent in history and that truly
creative thought will both remove the oppressive weight of the past
and initiate “new and higher modes of living and action” (CW 1:181).
Such thought is not translatable, however, into a collective ideology,
and it does not inspire mass movements. On the contrary, the students’
approach to reform reflects their trust in the power of the moral
sentiment, a trust, needless to say, that is Emerson’s own: “I think
that the soul of reform . . . reliance on the sentiment of man, which
will work best the more it is trusted; not reliance on numbers, but,
contrariwise, distrust of numbers, and the feeling that then we are
strongest, when most private and alone” (CW 1:176). The students’
idealism, in other words, has to be actualized by everyone individually.
The moral sentiment is not available “externally,” and obedience to it
is not possible by deputy or en masse. Put simply, the heart of reform
is the moral regeneration of the individual.
Emerson’s overall view of society is not as negative, however, as
this argument might suggest. His general optimism, his meliorism,
his belief in the ultimate moral governance of the universe (see the
questionable status of evil, discussed in chapter 2) inevitably also
colored his view of society. In its actual state, society may be evil,
but its “tendencies” point to a better future; even its current evil is a
necessary antithesis in a dialectical progress toward good. Throughout
his intellectual career, Emerson believed deeply in the power and
ultimate prevalence of the affirmative, the positive, the constructive.
These he considered the factors that keep the universe in existence. He
never seriously doubted that “the law after which the Universe was
made” implies “a force always at work to make the best better and the
worst good” (W 11:486). What is negative and disruptive is defeated,
absorbed, or transcended by nature and by the deepest tendencies in
human nature (W 7:306–8; 12:61–62). The genius of human language
ultimately negates negation. Wittgenstein said that the limits of our
language are the limits of our world;18 and through its regularity and
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6.

Others 105
inner logic, language gives us a world that has structure and coherence.
And as we saw in the preceding chapter, the negative and the disruptive
also run counter to our deep emotional and psychological yearning for
unity and harmony. It is not surprising, therefore, that Emerson treats
even society and the state as dimensions of a transcendent whole.
His “wise skepticism,” while relentlessly questioning and criticizing
actual institutions and social attitudes, nevertheless recognizes their
ultimate relatedness to a deeper reality. Appearances notwithstanding,
such institutions and attitudes are “reverend . . . in their tendency
and spirit” (CW 4:89, 97). Emerson illustrates his complex position
perhaps most clearly in an 1837 lecture on “Politics”:
[W]e find in all times and countries every great man does in all
his nature point at and imply the existence and well-being of all
the orders and institutions of a state. He is full of reverence. He
is by inclination, (how far soever in position) the defender of . . .
the church, the priest, the judge, the legislator, the executive arm.
Throughout his being is he loyal, even when by circumstance
arrayed in opposition to the actual order of things. Such was
Socrates, St. Paul, Luther, Milton, Burke. (EL 2:78)
However indirectly, society and the state do serve moral ends and
thus contribute to an all-encompassing moral order. Their very con-
ventions and routines, although in most cases fatal to originality and
authenticity, provoke some individuals to intellectual and moral self-
assertion. Part of the problem with social and political institutions
and conventions is that they are objects of common knowledge. Our
very familiarity with them stands in the way of our fully, consciously,
critically knowing them. Their very Alltäglichkeit (“everydayness”), as
Wittgenstein said, makes them “invisible” to us. Or as Whitehead
put it, “Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about
them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the
obvious.”19 Such analysis presupposes our destroying our familiarity
with the object of thought so that we are prepared to encounter it
in its essential nature, in its fundamental otherness—and then achieve
real knowledge of it by overcoming that otherness. Only through defa-
miliarization can we fulfill our moral obligation to achieve awareness
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1.129; Alfred North White-

head, Science and the Modern World, 4.
of what surrounds us and in the process extend the domain of our
conscious life. In Emerson’s words, “the interrogation of custom at all
points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind”
(CW 4:97). Put differently, the only way we can escape spiritual
emptiness and alienation as members of society is by raising our social
existence to the level of moral awareness. In practice this means that
each of us must “call the institutions of society to account, and examine
their fitness to him” (CW 1:153). As citizens, we should never “let the
conscience sleep, but . . . keep it irritated by the presence & reiterated
action of reforms & ideas” (JMN 8:134). In this spirit Emerson insists
that we adhere to the reality of virtue rather than to what in society
is reputed to be such (“Is the name of Virtue to be a barrier to that
which is Virtue?”—CW 4:101); that we “not be hindered by the name
of goodness, but . . . explore if it be goodness”—CW 2:29–30); that
before we urge patriotism we make sure what it stands for (JMN 5:87);
and that we stop living in illusions about ourselves and our political
freedom (our timidity has turned us into “slaves . . . crowing about
liberty”—W 6:23).
Society presents other provocations advancing the cause of ethics.
Its very resistance to new ideas urges their proponents to clarify and
purify them. Evil itself, Emerson insists, plays a positive ethical role.
Wicked politicians have an eventually beneficial effect through the
moral resistance they provoke. Oppression rouses the spirit of liberty.
Slavery recoils on the enslaver (EL 2:154; W 11:125). The forces of evil
provide the antagonism that the good needs in order to assert itself:
“without enemies, no hero” (W 6:255). Emerson’s cosmic optimism
maintains that “Nature turns all malfeasance to good” and that “the
first lesson of history is the good of evil” (W 6:252–53). Ultimately
every society tilts to the good, not necessarily as a result of deliberate
moral choice but because contravening the moral order of things turns
out to be ruinous: “The laws of nature are in harmony with each
other: that which the head and the heart demand is found to be,
in the long run, for what the grossest calculator calls his advantage.
The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of
the parties” (W 11:125). That “permanent interest” is not always a
matter of political or economic advantage. Emerson seems to extend
the principle of mutual recognition examined above when, discussing
emancipation in the British West Indies, he says that “the civility of
Others 107
no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded” (W 11:145).

The abolition of slavery is thus not only a response to the claims of
interracial justice but also an advantage, moral and psychological, to
the slaveholding race.
The best evidence, Emerson suggests, of the fundamental moral
decency of society is that those who aspire to lead it invariably present
the causes they argue for in a morally attractive light, irrespective of
whether these causes are intrinsically good or evil. Daniel O’Connell
provides Emerson with a clear illustration:
As soon as one acts for large masses, the moral element will &
must be allowed for, will & must work. Daniel O’Connell is no
saint, yet at this vast meeting on the hill of Tara 18 miles from
Dublin, of 500 000 persons, he almost preaches; he goes for tem-
perance, for law & order, & suggests every reconciling, gentilizing,
humanizing consideration. There is little difference between him
& Father Matthew, when the audience is thus enormously swelled.
(JMN 9:21)
Even more striking than the example of O’Connell is that of tyrants.

Tyranny always attempts to justify itself by presenting its wickedness
as, in fact, a higher good. “It is remarkable,” Emerson writes, “how
rare in the history of tyrants is an immoral law. Some color, some
indirection was always used” (W 11:187). In our century we know all
too well that wiping out entire populations can be presented as the
rightful acquisition of Lebensraum, or that genocide can be perpetrated
in obedience to laws enacted to ensure racial “purity.” To Emerson, the
nadir of legal immorality was the Fugitive Slave Law; but those who
supported that law, like Daniel Webster, paid tribute to the moral sense
of the nation at large by presenting it as “a pacification . . . a measure
of conciliation” (W 11:198).
Emerson’s other-regarding ethics finds its most rarefied expression

in his treatment of friendship and love. The interpersonal relationships
denoted by these terms are, in his view, ethically the most fragile but
also potentially the most enhancing. Indeed, “he will have learned
the lesson of life who is skilful in the ethics of friendship” (W 7:129).
Similarly, “love is a name for almost all virtue” (CS 2:136), a statement
stressing both the ethical primacy of love and the difficulty of living up
to its ethical demands. Friendship and love are ethically “vulnerable”
for three reasons: first, the relationships are often perceived as a means
of escape from individual inadequacy (loneliness, need of sympathy,
sense of incompleteness) and thus are in danger of becoming a refuge
for weakness rather than a basis for the joint pursuit of human ex-
cellence; second, the reciprocal nature of the relationships involves
a precarious balance between selfishness and altruism; and third,
our human craving for stability and certitude induces us to ignore
that the health of the relationships requires their being ever-evolving.
Friendship and love, Emerson suggests, can succeed in their ethicizing
role only if they build on strength rather than weakness, encompass
the clearly defined rights of self and other, and involve self and other
in an unending dialectic.
Rather than being a refuge for the weak, friendship and love should
be made instrumental to the attainment of human excellence. Emer-
son is aware that the instrumental value of these relationships depends
upon each person bringing to them the highest possible degree of in-
dividual excellence. “Let us feel,” he says in “Friendship,” “the absolute
insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us.” Only when we
have made ourselves “finished men” will we be in a position to “grasp
heroic hands in heroic hands” (CW 2:125). Put differently, “we must
be our own, before we can be another’s,” and only because “we are
more our own,” can we become “more each other’s” (CW 2:124, 126).
Each individual must contribute his or her “completed” self: “There
must be very two, before there can be very one.” Or stated in a sublime
paradox, “The condition which high friendship demands, is, ability to
do without it” (CW 2:123).
Emerson recognizes that there is an inevitably selfish or possessive
element in friendship and love. Unlike benevolence, friendship and
love demand reciprocity. Neither relationship is satisfactory unless the
love or friendship one feels for a person is returned in some degree.
And the deeper one’s feelings, the more intense one’s longing that
they be reciprocated. Deep love, as Dante’s Francesca da Rimini said
in self-justification, does not permit the person loved not to love in
return (“Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona”).20 This characteristic
20. Dante, Inferno 5.103.

Others 109
of the relationship can easily endanger the individuality or integrity

of the persons involved in it. Emerson counters this danger in two
ways. He advocates a friendship and love based on distance rather
than closeness; and he redirects the possessive instinct to values and
ideals that turn possessiveness into a morally enhancing rather than
diminishing trait.
In Emerson’s treatment of friendship and love, the empirically
grounded affinitive emotions play a less important part than the emo-
tion of respect commanded by the moral law. Whatever Emerson’s
temperamental limitations may have been on the emotional plane,
ethically he was justified in deemphasizing the affinitive emotions. He
is in emphatic agreement with a central Kantian tenet when he insists
that “Reverence is a great part of [friendship]” (CW 2:123).21 As he
sees it, emotional closeness undermines respect; as already indicated,
respect for the dignity of persons is of paramount moral importance
to him as well as to Kant. Emerson safeguards the integrity of everyone
involved by treating respect for others as the natural counterpart to self-
respect: “Selfreliance applied to another person is reverence, that is,
only the selfrespecting will be reverent” (JMN 7:371). Put simply, “the
complement of . . . self-respect . . . is deference” (CW 3:80). Everyone
gains morally when our reverence is such that we “seek our friend . . .
sacredly” and do not try to “appropriate him to ourselves.” Friendship,
in a word, “demands a religious treatment,” and “no degree of affec-
tion need invade this religion.” In all relationships we should keep
“the island of a man inviolate”; indeed, “lovers should guard their
strangeness” (CW 2:117, 123; 3:80–81). Our attempts to overcome
this strangeness would be a violation of the respect we owe to the
mystery that is the other. Emerson, obviously, sees nothing valuable in
romantically idealized or sentimental notions of friendship and love.
Any relationship involving abdication of self he regards as pernicious.
The strength of Emerson’s conviction on this point may be gauged
from his stressing repeatedly that in friendship and love opposition
is preferable to surrender. It is far better to be “a nettle in the side
of your friend than his echo” (CW 2:122–23). Although those who
love us are dear to us and “enlarge our life,” dearer still “are those
21. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Tugendlehre §46, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:469–71.
who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life” (CW 3:162).
Perhaps most telling is the statement: “Let [thy friend] be to thee
forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered” (CW
2:124). George Kateb has commented learnedly on possible ancient
or modern sources of and parallels to Emerson’s concept of the friend
as a “beautiful enemy,” but he finds none of them quite satisfactory.
The most likely source for the term, it seems to me, is Goethe’s
Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809), which Emerson
read (in German) as early as 1832 (JMN 6:106). In a short story
inserted in his novel, Goethe refers twice to the heroine as the “schöne
Feindin” (beautiful enemy) of the man she loves. It should be noted,
however, that in Emerson’s theory of friendship, “beautiful enemy”
has implications far beyond the rather straightforward meaning the
term has in Goethe’s story.22
Emerson’s conception of friendship was not always so agonistic. In
some sermon paragraphs blending (unattributed) statements on the
excellences of friendship from Aristotle and Montaigne (CS 4:50), he
claims, among other things, that “a true friend is another self”—by
which he means, another oneself, a second myself—thus adopting a
central Aristotelian definition of “friend.” Montaigne had also adopted
this view. Actually, as John Michael points out, “Montaigne exceeds
Aristotle’s idea of the identity between friends.” He is even more
emphatic, as we learn from his essay “Of Friendship,” that the friend “is
not another person: he is me.” On occasion, Emerson found himself
in agreement with such sentiments. “In the friendship I speak of,”
Montaigne wrote, “they [our souls] mix and blend so thoroughly that
they efface the seam that joined them and cannot find it again.”23
22. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften 2.10, Gedenkausgabe, 9:220–

21; George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, 110–12. Kateb states that Emerson’s thought
of the friend as beautiful enemy “seems to exceed even Nietzsche in its daring” (110),
and by way of comparison he points to a (somewhat distant) parallel in The Gay Science
(§279). He overlooks, however, the passage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where Nietzsche
not only equals Emerson in “daring” but also seems to echo him: “In one’s friend one
should still honor the enemy. . . . In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy”
(Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. 1, “Vom Freunde,” Sämtliche Werke, 4:71). The only scholar,
so far as I know, to have claimed that the “schöne Feindin” of Die Wahlverwandtschaften
is “the probable immediate source of Emerson’s term” is Erik Thurin (Emerson as Priest
of Pan, 182).
23. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 9.4.5; 9.9.1; Magna Moralia 2.15. Michael, Emerson
and Skepticism, 115. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, 191, 188.
Others 111
With apparent approval, Emerson copied this passage (in Cotton’s

translation) on a loose sheet of paper filed with his lecture “The
Heart” (EL 2:466). Emerson also knew that Montaigne’s great essay was
inspired by the latter’s friendship with Étienne de la Boétie. He states
in “The Heart” that “there is no more remarkable example in modern
times of a thorough and noble friendship than that of Montaigne and
Stephen de Boece” (EL 2:290). It is all the more remarkable, therefore,
that he chose to make his poem “Étienne de la Boéce” (W 9:82)
the means of expressing a strikingly different, an agonistic view of
friendship:
I serve you not, if you I follow,

Shadowlike, o’er hill and hollow;
And bend my fancy to your leading,
All too nimble for my treading.
When the pilgrimage is done,
And we’ve the landscape overrun,
I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,
And your heart is unsupported.
Vainly valiant, you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist . . .
The germ of Emerson’s conception of friendship as contest is in all

probability traceable to another emphasis in Aristotle’s complex ethic
of friendship. (Aristotle, as Anders Hallengren has usefully reminded
us, affected Emerson’s ideas more significantly than the usual view of
Emerson the Platonist or Neoplatonist suggests.)24 Aristotelian friend-
ship involves emulation and mutual correction. Aristotle concludes his
long and detailed discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics
with the statement that good humans “seem actually to become better
by putting their friendship into practice, and because they correct each
other’s faults, for each takes the impress from the other of those traits
in him that give him pleasure—whence the saying: Noble deeds from
noble men.”25 Emerson, as he did so often, showed his genius by
creatively engaging such ideas and developing them into insights that
can only be called Emersonian.
24. Hallengren, The Code of Concord, 347–48.

25. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 9.12.3, H. Rackham’s translation (Loeb Classical
Library). For discussion of Aristotle’s view, see Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness,
362–63.
Much of what precedes makes it abundantly clear that, according
to Emerson, the possessive element in friendship and love cannot
possibly have the other person for its object. In a perfect friendship,
friends would be, in Thucydides’ words as quoted by Emerson, “a
possession for all time” (CW 2:115).26 But as Kant remarked, such per-
fect friendships are nothing more than “the hobbyhorse of novelists”
(das Steckenpferd der Romanenschreiber).27 Emerson agreed: “Friends,
such as we desire, are dreams and fables” (CW 2:125). As will be
obvious from the rest of this chapter, Emerson’s reinterpretation of
“possessiveness” is rife with conceptual echoes of the theory of love
that Socrates attributes to Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. What friends
can “possess,” Emerson asserts, is a shared ideal or aspiration, a joint
commitment to the pursuit of virtue or excellence. What truly binds
friends and lovers is not “the low and proprietary sense of Do you love
me,” but “the divine affinity of virtue with itself” (CW 4:72; 2:115).
To those who find this kind of love or friendship rather too ethereal,
Emerson replies that it is “foolish to be afraid of making our ties too
spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love” (CW 2:125).
A love or friendship based on the common pursuit of spiritual
values is of necessity processual rather than static. Not only are values
such as truth, goodness, virtue, and excellence unattainable in their
absoluteness (and thus invite to endless pursuit), but they also inval-
idate all attempts to confine them to the qualities embodied in the
loved person: “It is not me, but the worth [in me], that fixes [your]
love: and that worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond
me” (CW 4:72–73). Considerations like these led Emerson to rethink
the question of reciprocity in friendship and love. As he puts it in the
concluding paragraph of his essay on “Friendship,”
26. Emerson owned a copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (Walter
Harding, Emerson’s Library, 272), and he repeatedly referred to or quoted from it. As a
teacher of moral lessons, the Greek historian ranked among the very best, in Emerson’s
view: “The charm of Plutarch & Plato & Thucydides for me I believe, is that there I get
ethics without cant” (JMN 5:353). Thucydides made the famous claim that his work was
intended not as a prize-essay to be heard and forgotten, but as “a possession for all time”
(ktēma es aei—Historiai 1.22.4)—a possession for those through the ages who truly
“hear” and understand it. Freely applying this idea to friendship, Emerson writes: “Who
hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,—a possession for all time” (CW 2:114–
15). He also quoted the phrase in Greek in English Traits (CW 5:12; see 5:199 n.12.8).
27. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Tugendlehre §46, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:470.
Others 113
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a

friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on
the other. . . . It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But . . .
true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy
object, and dwells and broods on the eternal. (CW 2:127)
Instead of being based on personal reciprocity, true love and friendship

consist in an endless dialectical process involving as opposites the
infinitude of spiritual values and their finite realization in the persons
of lovers and friends. Consequently,
Of progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do

you love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are
happy with the same happiness: but presently one of us passes
into the perception of new truth; we are divorced, and no tension
in nature can hold us to each other. (CW 4:72)
Such “divorce,” however, is a necessary antithesis in the dialectical

progress to a higher synthesis: “It is only when you leave and lose me
by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than both of us,
that I draw near and find myself at your side” (CW 4:72). In short,
as Emerson puts it in “Friendship,” “we part only to meet again on a
higher platform” (CW 2:126).
In the course of their dialectical progress, love and friendship thus
increasingly transcend the personal. What Gregory Vlastos says about
Plato’s theory in the Symposium is perfectly applicable to Emerson’s
position: “The individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her
individuality, will never be the object of . . . love. . . . Plato’s theory . . .
does not provide for love of whole persons, but only for love of that
abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their
best qualities.” In his review of the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence,
Henry James stated the matter more simply: “Emerson speaks of his
friends too much as if they were disembodied spirits.”28 Emerson urges
commitment to the spiritual, moral, or intellectual ideal itself rather
than to its temporary and imperfect incarnations. Instead of “loving
[the virtues] in one,” we should “lov[e] them in all”—which amounts
to transcending the personal element altogether and loving the virtues
28. Gregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 31; Henry James, The American Essays, 47.
for their own sake. Our affections “are but tents of a night” that should
not distract us from contemplating the “overarching vault, bright with
galaxies of immutable lights” (CW 2:106, 109–10). Emerson concedes
that the heart resists such abstractions, that its natural tendency is to
idealize the person loved, to see perfection in the imperfect. But, he
insists, “even love, which is the deification of persons, must become
more impersonal every day” (CW 2:107). For Emerson, it appears, love
and friendship are but stages in the unending progress of the soul:
beautiful though these human relations now often are, they “must be
succeeded and supplanted . . . by what is more beautiful, and so on
for ever” (CW2:110).
5
Everyday Life
E thics is concerned not only with one’s duties to oneself and to

others, but also, more generally, with the quality of human life.
Questions about the nature of the good life and the means of attaining
it have been with us ever since Socrates decided that the unexamined
life was not worth living. In premodern times the good life was held to
consist in one’s dedication to, for instance, the search for the highest
knowledge (Socrates, Plato), the contemplation of philosophical truth
(Aristotle), absolute rational self-mastery (the Stoics), sainthood (the
medieval Church), the chivalric ideal (the later Middle Ages), or heroic
virtue (French neoclassicism). Although none of these pursuits has lost
its idealistic attraction and several of them may continue to define the
good life for some individuals, they are too “exceptional” to have wide
appeal in an egalitarian world. With the coming of the modern age,
Charles Taylor points out, “the previous ‘higher’ forms of life were
dethroned” and “ordinary life,” the “sense of the importance of the
everyday in human life,” became “the very center of the good life.” Or
as Agnes Heller puts it, “in our modern world the human condition
resides in everyday life,” and, consequently, the good of the human
condition depends on the quality of everyday life.1 What gives value
and meaning to our existence, what makes our lives fulfilling and
worth living, has to be looked for in the everyday.
As a source of meaning and value, everyday life poses two problems.
First, its very ordinariness, repetitiveness, and routines seem both to
frustrate the conscious, aware, authentic living that alone can render
1. Plato, Apology 38A. Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen; Paul Bénichou,
Morales du grand siècle. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 13–14. Agnes Heller, Can Modernity
Survive? 45.
115
human experience meaningful and to preclude the generation of any
values likely to appear worth pursuing. Formerly, the “higher” ideals
had their locus outside and “above” everyday life and thus could in-
spire those living everyday lives. Nothing, in theory at least, prevented a
medieval peasant from aspiring to sainthood or a slave from becoming
a Stoic philosopher (as the case of Epictetus proves). In the modern
age, inspiration has to come from within everyday life, and everyday
life is, almost by definition, uninspiring. The second problem arises
from the fact that we live our everyday lives in the modern world—a
world experienced by many as emptied of value and meaning. The “de-
valuation” of our world was already keenly felt by Emerson and his
contemporaries. Laurence Lockridge has described Romantic ethics as
“a crisis ethics brought about by the impoverishment and imminent
collapse of collective value structures” and as an assertion of value
“against a backdrop of negation.” The Romantics considered meaning
or meaningfulness to be as much threatened as value: they experienced
firsthand what Max Weber famously called die Entzauberung der Welt
(“the disenchantment of the world”)—a world where the dominance
of rationalism, intellectualism, and scientism had led to imaginative
and symbolic impoverishment. One important Romantic task was to
reendow life with a richer meaning, with depth, dignity, and purpose.
In Lockridge’s words, “the good life is one that generates as it goes
a continuously enhanced significance.”2 Emerson, characteristically,
spends little time analyzing the problems that threaten everyday life—
both intrinsically and in its relation to the modern world—as a source
of value and meaning. But since so many of his assertions and affir-
mations appear to be responses to those problems, there can be no
doubt about his troubled awareness of them. His prescriptions for the
good life can be grouped under three headings: Imagination, Beauty,
and Experience.
I
Emerson recognized the banality of the everyday as a central fact
of modern life that had to be confronted head-on. He had little
2. Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism, 145–46. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als

Beruf,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 536.
Everyday Life 117
respect for such oblique solutions, or pseudo-solutions, to the mod-

ern malaise as joining utopian communities, pursuing the remote
or the exotic, and embracing an ancient faith (“This running into
the Catholic Church is disgusting,” he wrote, a statement no doubt
based on the “disgust” he experienced when his friend Anna Barker
Ward converted to Catholicism—JMN 15:336; 14:330–31). Not even
Romantic Hellenism, which to many was culturally the most inspiring
solution, held any appeal for him. As Barbara Packer says, “Romantic
Hellenism bored Emerson.”3 Instead of indulging in vain attempts to
escape from our modern condition, we should face it and try to redeem
it. The chosen instrument of such redemption Emerson believed to
be an enhanced imagination that would enable us to apprehend the
inexhaustible symbolic richness of our everyday world and thus, in
effect, to bring about a “re-enchantment” of that world:
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the

common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What
is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these
things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of
the fact. . . . [But] to the wise . . . a fact is true poetry, and the most
beautiful of fables. (CW 1:44)
Emerson insisted repeatedly that an ability to take the ordinary as

a cause for wonder marks “the difference between the wise and the
unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at
the usual” (CW 3:167). We therefore must rediscover the wonder in the
everyday, the magic in the plainest fact. Indeed, “in the common things,
is always the field of the most splendid discoveries.” Unfortunately, we
fail to see the splendor in the grass (Wordsworth obviously fits into
this argument) because of our foolish preoccupation with “inscrutable
mysteries or obscure controversies or distant countries” (CS 4:79). This
whole argument makes it clear that Emerson’s famous advocacy, in
“The American Scholar,” of literature exploring “the near, the low, the
common” (CW 1:67) was inspired as much by ethical as by aesthetic
considerations: he was pleading for recognition of the worth of the
ordinary and commonplace. As Nicolai Hartmann emphasizes, the

very appreciation of the everyday, the affirmation of its overriding
significance, is in itself a crucial ethical stance.4
The imaginative restoration of our world is contingent upon our
commitment to simplicity, our avoidance of routine, and our rever-
ence for symbol. Simplicity requires our removing or transcending
the obstacles, both within and without, that prevent our direct con-
frontation with the essential facts. Among such obstacles are respect
for tradition (“Reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous
sentiment”—W 7:177; see also the Divinity School “Address” and the
opening lines of Nature); our tendency to glamorize what is distant
in time and space (“The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us
of our superstitious associations with places and times”—CW 2:152);
the attractions of escapism which prevent our realizing that “fact is
better than fiction” (W 7:107); and society’s insistence on conformity
and our consequent victimization by “this Gorgon of Convention and
Fashion” (W 7:133). What matters is the here and now, “the quality of
the moment . . . the depth at which we live” (W 7:183). The moment
truly lived amounts to an experience of eternity (W 7:178, 183); to
inspired perception there are no dull, despised, prosaic facts, but “the
day of facts is a rock of diamonds, [and] a fact is an Epiphany of God”
(EL 3:47). What we need is not an escape into some romanticized
past or utopian future, but “insight into today,” “the theory of this
particular Wednesday” (CW 1:67; W 7:179).5
Simplicity is “the perfectness of man” because it embodies unqual-
ified “trust in the Soul itself” (EL 3:171, 302). Since the Soul always is,
its only valid incarnation is the ever-present Now. The human must,
therefore, embrace the Now and endeavor to become aware of the
Soul-in-the-Now. The Soul does not fade in the light of common day
but appears to those knowing how to read it by that light. “I at least
fully believe,” Emerson wrote in 1836, “that God is in every place, &
that, if the mind is excited, it may see him, & in him an infinite wisdom
in every object that passes before us” (JMN 5:150). Two years earlier he
noted that “to a soul alive to God every moment is a new world” (JMN
4:266). From “The Over-Soul” we learn that a person attuned to the
4. Hartmann, Ethik, 7–16.

5. See further Robinson, “A Theory of Wednesdays,” Emerson and the Conduct of Life,
174–80.
Everyday Life 119
Soul encounters it—or, pantheistically speaking, the One and thus his
or her true Self—“in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience
of the common day” (CW 2:172). Once awakened to this cardinal
fact, we shall no longer regard our everyday lives and the modern
world as hopelessly banal and expend our spirit in nostalgic longing
for the grandeur of an imagined past. Our present lives are “needlessly
mean” because we fail to remember that the source of true splendor
is simplicity: “by the depth of our living [we] should deck [our lives]
with more than regal or national splendor” (CW 2:152–53).
A major impediment to deep, aware, imaginatively enriched living
is routine in its various forms. “Repetition,” Emerson writes, “is anti-
spiritual,” and “the coarse mattings of custom” prevent “all wonder”
(CW 4:154; 3:167). He agrees with Carlyle that mysteries and miracles
confront us every day, but that custom has made us insensible of them.6
The banality of our daily lives seems to more than justify all the ennui
and taedium vitae we sometimes experience, and yet one’s very existence
as a human being is a fact “of such bewildering astonishment that it
seems as if it were the part of reason to spend one’s lifetime in a
trance of wonder” (CS 4:230). This trance of wonder recalls Pascal’s
astonishment, when he considered the immensity of space and time,
at being “here, now.”7
Emerson also devotes much of his eloquence in prose and verse
to awakening us to a sense of the miraculous in the everyday aspects
and processes of nature. In his autobiography Goethe tells the story
of a man of great distinction who every spring was exasperated at
the earth’s inveterate habit of turning green—as if one’s familiarity
with that occurrence in any way diminished its miraculousness.8 As
Carlyle says, of all the tricks that custom plays upon us, “perhaps the
cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple
repetition, ceases to be Miraculous.”9 Or in the words of the Divinity
School “Address,” “the mystery of nature . . . has not yielded yet one
word of explanation,” and the real miracles are such things as “the
blowing clover and the falling rain” (CW 1:76, 81). Nature is dull
6. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 259–60.

7. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 125.
8. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, bk. 13, Gedenkausgabe, 10:632.
9. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 259.
and repetitive only to the atrophied imagination. To imaginatively
empowered perception, every glimpse of nature “hath a grandeur”
(CW 1:39). Such perception sees no repetition whatever in nature:
“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and
in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never
seen before, and which shall never be seen again” (CW 1:14).
Emerson’s chief antidote to routine, to the “anti-spiritual” repet-
itiveness to which humans are liable, is spontaneity, which he calls
“the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life” (CW 2:37). He preaches
“the soul active,” the ever-creative, ever-renewed and renewing self,
as “the sound estate of every man” (CW 1:56–57). Newness, fresh-
ness, and surprise are hallmarks of the Soul’s self-revelations. In fact,
even “the moral sentiment is well called ‘the newness,’ for it is never
other” (CW 3:40). Emerson, therefore, prefers thinking to thought,
speculation to doctrine, action to its results, creativity to its products.
His defense of inconsistency is a further expression of this outlook
(CW 2:33).
Nothing hinders the imaginative experience of everyday life more
than the routine of our daily work, and nothing is more responsible
for the instrumentalization of human beings. Indeed, “the laborer [is]
sacrificed to the splendid result,” and “the tools run away with the
workman” (CW 1:121, 129). The worker should not be “bereaved
of that nobility which comes from the superiority to his work,” and
he should remember that his work has no value “except so far as
it embodies his spiritual prerogatives” (CW 1:121). Edward Waldo
Emerson noted that a statement like this anticipates some of William
Morris’s ideas about restoring joy and beauty to labor (W 1:435).10
The fundamental ethical problem here is the violation of personhood
inherent in reducing what should be an end (the human being and his
or her spiritual self-realization) to a means (the human-as-machine
in the service of productivity). Only to the degree that the products of
labor objectify the human spirit do they attain moral value and thus
transcend the purely economic category of price. The human spirit,
needless to say, cannot express itself through something as antispiri-
tual as routine. Only an authentic, truly creative act can embody an
10. For additional commentary, see Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 160;
also 217n156, for Emerson’s influence on the founders of the arts and crafts movement.
Everyday Life 121
aspect of one’s spirit. Optimally, one’s every act should be so true an

expression of one’s ever-evolving spirit as to be unique. Unique acts
are the only ones that completely escape from the taint of routine.
Therefore, “I do not wish to do one thing but once” (CW 1:212).
Like simplicity, and unlike routine, symbolic awareness and rever-
ence for symbol are positive factors in the imaginative enrichment of
our lives. Emerson was as convinced as Ernst Cassirer that the human
is animal symbolicum.11 We live in a human world—a world shaped by
human creativity (language, art) and efforts at interpretation (myth,
religion, science). The symbolic universe resulting from these activities
has become our “natural” home to the point that generally we are no
longer aware of its symbolic dimension. The imaginative enrichment
of our lives involves our being reawakened to the fact that “we are
symbols, and inhabit symbols” (CW 3:12). Symbolic awareness will
enable us to apprehend the spirit of which the events or facts of every-
day life are expressions; it will help us perceive the deeper meanings of
common things and occurrences. Thus it will transform our everyday
world into “a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems” (CW
3:10). We simply “must have symbols,” and the imagination is “the
great awakening power” that makes us realize that we live indeed in
a world of symbols (W 7:212). The importance of this realization is
apparent from Emerson’s claim that “the imagination is not a talent
of some men but is the health of every man” (W 8:56).
Emerson heightens the ethical significance of his argument by treat-
ing the imagination as a source of joy: “There is a joy in perceiving the
representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or
event can ever give” (W 6: 304). Or as he put it elsewhere, “the deepest
pleasure comes I think from the occult belief that an unknown mean-
ing & consequence lurk in the common every day facts” (JMN 5:212).
Joy and pleasure, needless to say, enhance the quality of everyday life.
Moreover, since hedonism is itself an ethical orientation of ancient
and distinguished pedigree, Emerson’s concern with joy and pleasure
locates his treatment of the imagination all the more firmly within
ethics.
Our reverence for symbol should be enacted in our daily lives. Our
common everyday acts should acquire sacramental significance. From
11. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 26.

the poet, the philosopher, and the saint, for whom “all things are . . .
sacred . . . all days holy, all men divine,” we should learn that “any
thing man can do, may be divinely done” (CW 2:8, 83). The most
honorable ambition is not “to win laurels in the state or the army . . .
but to be a master of living well, and to administer the offices of master
or servant, of husband, father and friend.” This ambition we can realize
only if we hold ourselves and others “sacred” (W 7:122). In his essay
“Friendship,” Emerson urges that we “dignify to each other the daily
needs and offices of man’s life” (CW 2:121). He had no patience with
empty rituals, but ritual at its best, that is, as an expression in action
of spiritual truth, he valued highly. As he put it in “Manners,” “The
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should recall, however
remotely, the grandeur of our destiny” (CW 3:81). Every act “becomes
an act of religion” when the person acting is guided by spiritual law.
Religion should “cease to be occasional” so that “the consecration of
Sunday” will no longer “confess the desecration of the entire week,” nor
“the consecration of the church confess the profanation of the house”
(W 7:132–33). Every day and every act, in sum, should embody the
Spirit striving for self-realization in the lives of all of us.
II
Emerson considered a craving for beauty to be a fundamental trait of

humanity. The desire for beauty, “extend[ed] . . . to the uttermost,” is
as much “an ultimate end” of the human spirit as the yearning for
truth or for goodness. Beauty is an aspiration so essentially defining
our humanity that “no reason can be asked or given why the soul
seeks beauty” (CW 1:17). Although beauty as such defies analysis
(EL 1:101; W 6:289, 303), its manifestations have a “pictorial” or
symbolic quality that makes them more concretely accessible to the
perceiver than the conceptualizations of truth or the actualizations of
goodness. For this reason, beauty “is the form under which the intellect
prefers to study the world”; it is the form that leads us to “thinking
of the foundations of things” (W 6:287–88). Similarly, beauty “is
the mark God sets upon virtue” (CW 1:15). Truth and goodness, in
other words, are most readily apprehensible as beauty: they appear as
intellectual or moral beauty. This giving an aesthetic dimension to
Everyday Life 123
conceptual and ethical categories should come as no surprise from a

man who wrote: “I am in all my theory, ethics, and politics a poet”
(L 3:18).
Beauty thus plays an indispensable role in the good life. It is “need-
ful to man” (CW 1:13) not only because it educates the senses and
the feelings—thus fulfilling its purely “aesthetic” function (the Greek
term aisthēsis means “sensation,” “perception,” “feeling”)—but also
because of its educative role in the moral and intellectual spheres. The
search for beauty is not only human but also humanizing precisely
because beauty educates all of our highest faculties: it appeals to us
aesthetically (the beauty “of general nature, of the human face and
form, of manners”), intellectually (the beauty “of brain or method”),
and ethically (“moral beauty or beauty of the soul”—W 6:287). Most
relevant to my subject, of course, is the role of beauty in everyday life
and everyday ethics.
Arguing against his audience’s assumption that beauty occupies
a realm far removed from the routine and banality of everyday life,
Emerson assured them that, on the contrary, daily life is “embosomed
in beauty” (CW 2:77). He attempted to convince them of the validity
of this claim, first, by reawakening them to a sense of the inexhaustible
beauty of nature, and, second, by presenting art not as something
exceptional and set apart from common experience but as something
“natural.” The beauty of art, in other words, is as “democratically”
available as the beauty of nature, if only we are capable of perceiving
it. As far as nature is concerned, its beauty is so often attested to
and invoked in Emerson’s prose and poetry as to make superfluous
a discussion of the importance he attached to it. Suffice it to say that
Emerson held that in order to appreciate nature fully we need to shed
our adult insensitivity and rediscover our childhood’s sense of wonder:
“The lover of nature is he . . . who has retained the spirit of infancy
even into the era of manhood” (CW 1:9). Although this argument has
a strongly Wordsworthian (and Coleridgean) flavor, Emerson is more
optimistic than the poet of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” about
the possibility of one’s retaining “the spirit of infancy.” To be sure, it
is “the bane of life that natural effects are continually crowded out,
and artificial arrangements substituted.” But the experiences of “early
youth [when] the earth spoke and the heavens glowed” need not be
lost as we grow older, as Emerson emphasizes in explicit contradiction
to a passage he quotes from Wordsworth’s “Ode” (W 7:297, 299). “In
the woods,” Emerson says synecdochically, “a man . . . at what period
soever of life, is always a child” (CW 1:10).
As for art, why should we think of it as confined to ancient cities and
modern museums when it is all around us? Every day the aesthetically
sensitive eye can appreciate
the eternal picture which nature paints in the street with mov-
ing men and children, beggars, and fine ladies, draped in red,
and green, and blue, and gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced,
black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish,—capped
and based by heaven, earth, and sea. (CW 2:212)
Even when speaking of the visual arts as more traditionally conceived,

Emerson argues against their “separate and contrasted existence.” He
insists that “beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinc-
tion between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten” (CW 2:217–
18). Having adopted German and Coleridgean organicism, which, in
M. H. Abrams’s words, “may be defined as the philosophy whose major
categories are derived metaphorically from the attributes of living and
growing things,”12 Emerson found it easy to interpret great works of art
as “natural” expressions of the human mind. Both Greek and Gothic
art illustrate the fact that “all beauty [is] organic,” that it grows from
within outward, that “outside embellishment is deformity” (W 6:290).
In truth, it is the soul that “created the arts wherever they have flour-
ished”; York Minster and St. Peter’s in Rome are but “copies of an
invisible archetype” inhering in the human mind (CW 2:47; 1:40).
Once this idea is accepted, American artists will stop imitating
European models and create art that authentically expresses the soul
of modern America, that is, art “called out by the necessity of the
people” (JMN 5:210–11). “Necessity” not only stimulated the demand
for socially responsible art, but it was also an essential criterion of
beauty itself, as Emerson had learned from Goethe as early as 1836
(JMN 5:129). In fact, “whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation
of the necessary” (W 7:52). Clearly, Emerson was groping toward a
theory of function-based beauty that anticipated the philosophy of
12. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition,
168.
Everyday Life 125
functional beauty that Horatio Greenough explained to him in 1852

(JMN 13:86) and that reached its maturity in the functionalism of the
early twentieth century. Organicism and “necessity” taken together
led to a “democratization” of the concept of art and, potentially, to a
general availability of beauty in everyday life.
Experiencing beauty is an important part of the good life not just on
aesthetic grounds, but also because of other emotions evoked by the
experience. In language reminiscent of King Lear, Emerson says that
without a sense of beauty a human seems “a poor, naked, shivering
creature” trapped in a cold, indifferent universe (W 7:213). Beauty,
by contrast, “warms the heart”; it “delights” and “emancipates”; it
brings cheerfulness and inspires enthusiasm; and it thus enables us
momentarily “to forget ourselves,” to escape from the burden of iden-
tity, thought, and memory (W 7:306; CW 2:190). Such momentary
disindividualization is a precondition of spiritual health; it also gives
us a sense of belonging to a transindividual reality. Emerson appropri-
ately alludes to the root meaning of enthusiasm (Greek enthousiasmos,
ultimately from entheos: having the god within, possessed by the god
[thus, inspired]) when he says: “Enthusiasm . . . is the passing from
the human to the divine” (W 10:171). Such states of mind not only
are necessary for exceptional achievement (“Nothing great was ever
achieved without enthusiasm”—CW 2:190), but they obviously also
enhance the spiritual quality of everyday life.
The role of beauty in such enhancement is given additional em-
phasis by Emerson’s tendency to rank beauty higher than usefulness.
A person who “only lives to the useful” is “a beggar.” Such a person
merely serves “as a pin or rivet in the social machine” and never fulfills
the higher demands of humanness. In fact, “the most useful man in
the most useful world . . . would remain unsatisfied.” As soon as one
develops a sense of beauty, however, “life acquires a very high value.”
Beauty constitutes life’s “most ascending quality” (W 6:159, 289). This
hierarchy of values demonstrates how strongly the aesthetic view of
life appealed to Emerson. Making oneself useful is, to be sure, a matter
of obligation. Usefulness is something we owe to the world we live in.
Living a useless life is despicable, Emerson claimed, pertinently, in an
essay on “Aristocracy”: “To live without duties is obscene” (W 10:52).
Nevertheless, the flower of humanness is the ability to transcend
the obligation attendant upon usefulness and to attain the freedom
inherent in aesthetic experience, which, as Kant said in the Critique of
Judgment, is purely “disinterested” (ohne alles Interesse) and therefore
does not involve moral assent (Beifall).13 Such “useless” freedom is
the finest achievement of human culture. Nicolai Hartmann regarded
it as the real vindication of human existence: it is, in Hartmann’s apt
coinage, our “anthropodicy” (Anthropodizee).14 Clearly, Emerson was
sometimes tempted to embrace this view.
Emerson’s predilection for an aesthetic view of life is additionally
underscored by his tending to aestheticize ethics itself. He holds that
the moral law should attract through its charm and beauty, not oblige
through commands. Rightly apprehended, the moral law does not
command in any dogmatic fashion; instead it evokes love and venera-
tion on account of its transcendent beauty. As Emerson puts it in “The
Sovereignty of Ethics,” “the inspirations we catch of this law are . . .
joyful sparkles, and are recorded for their beauty, for the delight they
give, not for their obligation; and that is their priceless good to men,
that they charm and uplift, not that they are imposed” (W 10:209).
Elsewhere he says that “poetry . . . the love of beauty, lead [us] to the
adoration of the moral sentiment,” but that the New Testament has
lost “the charm of poetry” through its “inadmissible claim of positive
authority,” its imposing “an external command, where command can-
not be” (W 10:115–17). The Christ of the Divinity School “Address,”
not surprisingly, escapes from the distortions imposed on him by the
New Testament and exemplifies Emersonian aestheticism. In what
Joel Porte calls Emerson’s “startlingly heretical portrait” of Christ, the
dominant traits are Beauty and Joy. Christ, Porte says, “is offered to us
as a kind of first-century aesthete, replete with ‘locks of beauty,’ who
was ‘ravished’ by the ‘supreme Beauty’ of the soul’s mystery and went
out in a ‘jubilee of sublime emotion’ to tell us all ‘that God incarnates
himself in man.’ ”15
The relevance of this argument to everyday life is obvious when we
consider that a moral law that inspires on account of its beauty will
lead to actions that are themselves beautiful. In The Conduct of Life,
13. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft §§ 2, 5, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:204, 210.
14. Hartmann, Ethik, 462.
15. Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time, 115. The passages
Porte quotes are from CW 1:81, 83.
Everyday Life 127
Emerson complains of the dearth of such actions: “I suffer every day

from the want of perception of beauty in people. They do not know
the charm with which all moments and objects can be embellished,
the charm of manners, of self-command, of benevolence” (W 6:159).
Self-command and benevolence are obvious enactments of the moral
law; as for manners, politeness, courtesy, they have “benevolence as
[their] foundation” (CW 3:83). What matters to Emerson here is
the charm, the beauty, the attractiveness of actions that are morally
right. Ethics is thus potentially a major source of beauty in everyday
life. Indeed, the virtues “must be practised for their elegance. The
virtuous man must be a poet & not a drudge of his virtues” (JMN
4:385). The identification of the good with the beautiful is as old
as Plato (Symposium and elsewhere) and became a commonplace in
Platonizing Western thought—although Irving Babbitt complained
rather peevishly that the identification was disproved as far back as the
Trojan War (“Helen was beautiful, but was neither good nor true”)!16
For Emerson, it is a “truth, that perfect beauty and perfect goodness
are One,” that goodness is “Beauty in its highest form,” and that “in the
impression beauty makes upon us what is finest is moral” (EL 1:100,
110; 2:275). Through this subtle interweave of morality and beauty
Emerson avoided Nietzsche’s ultimate reduction of ethics to aesthetics
(Reduktion der Moral auf Aesthetik).17 Nevertheless, Emerson did claim
an important role for beauty in actual moral life. Ethics was not just a
matter of doing one’s duty (as discussed in chapters 3 and 4): doing
one’s duty could itself become an experience of beauty that enhanced
one’s everyday life.
III
Emerson’s concern with the quality of everyday life was also motivated
by a fear that he shared with many of his contemporaries and many
moderns—the fear of not having really lived, of not having truly
confronted the experience called life. Like many of us, he was haunted
by a sense that life is both elusive and illusive, that it is too impalpable
16. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 271.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Manuscript note (1881), Sämtliche Werke, 9:471.
and unreal to admit of true confrontation. How deeply he was affected
by this problem appears from Robert D. Richardson’s biography, where
Emerson’s “powerful craving for direct, personal, unmediated experi-
ence” becomes virtually an interpretational leitmotiv.18 Emerson was
heir to an intellectual outlook that had thoroughly problematized
experience. Hume had been unable to make up his mind about the
relationship of experience to thought, or about whether experience
is primarily one’s own individually or ours by virtue of our being
part of humankind. A major question confronting Kant in the Critique
of Pure Reason was, “How is experience possible?” What appeared to
Emerson to be threatened was the possibility of experience itself. Was
the self reduced to some form or other of epistemological solipsism
so that it could not apprehend anything but the content of its own
inner consciousness? Was the self, in other words, deprived of any
meaningful experience of a reality (however defined) outside itself?
What David Robinson calls Emerson’s “passion for reality” was an
anxious response to such questions.19
That these questions had at least as much existential as philo-
sophical urgency for Emerson is also evidenced by some well-known
sentences from the essay “Experience”:
There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that

here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth.
But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only
thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like
all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into
the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly
price of sons and lovers. . . . [Our] souls never touch their objects.
An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the
things we aim at and converse with. . . . I take this evanescence
and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our
fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome
part of our condition. (CW 3:29)
The good life obviously demands that we endeavor to overcome this

“most unhandsome part of our condition.” Emerson’s contribution
18. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 3 (source of quotation), 27, 46, 67–68,
116, 139, 438, 446.
19. Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 83.
Everyday Life 129
to the endeavor is to remind himself and us of the need to achieve

a deeper sense of the unrealized experiential possibilities of every-
day life.
The first step on the road to genuine experience is to become
better acquainted with the stranger that each of us is to himself or
herself. We should learn to “open [our] eyes . . . to the wonders of
[our] constitution,” “to contemplate with delight and reverence [our]
own faculties,” and to take “pleasure . . . in the right use of our powers”
(CS 4:147; 2:188). We should also become aware that in our own
proper person we reexperience and make concrete the moral and
intellectual struggles that constitute the course of human history and
thereby achieve a deeper insight into what it truly means to be a human
being. “Habits of reflexion and solitude” will further our awareness of
“depth in human nature” and thus give us a sense of the inexhaustible
richness and complexity of our humanness (CS 4:215–16). The fact
that no one can sound the depth nor fully articulate the richness and
complexity of his or her being makes the individual’s experience all
the more interesting and challenging: “Know thyself,” it appears, does
not refer to a command capable of fulfillment but to an endless quest.
Since, as already indicated, human individuality is not an objective
given but is largely constituted by self-conception and self-articulation,
the awareness of depth and richness within makes for an individual
who is deep and rich and who continues to reach for a deeper and
richer himself or herself.
Given the Emersonian principle that we can see only what we are
(CW 1:45; 2:86; 3:46), such a person experiences not only a rich inner
life but also the world as a place full of interest, complexity, and depth.
He or she does not “glid[e] ghostlike through the world” nor experi-
ence the world as itself “slight and unreal” (CW 3:161). Most of us
“swim, day by day, on a river of delusions.” Such persons, by contrast,
suggest that “life is a sincerity.” Their example demonstrates that reality
is accessible, that there are indeed “sane men who enjoy . . . a rich and
related existence” (CW 4:12). Emerson wants us to regain, in Stanley
Cavell’s words, “an intimacy with existence.” To him, “the everyday,
the ordinary, is not a given but a task”; that is, each of us must recover
a sense of the uniqueness, meaning, and depth of everyday life.20
20. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 6, 171.

A favorite Emersonian way of stressing the value of everyday ex-
perience is to assert its equivalence with the experiences of the great.
The richness and fullness of life are available to everyone attuned to
the immense possibilities of the everyday. Indeed, “life is always rich,
and spontaneous graces and forces elevate it in every domestic circle,
which are overlooked while we are reading something less excellent in
old authors” (W 10:198). Even the simplest life truly lived contains all
the essential human experiences and thus enables the man or woman
in question to “taste the real quality of existence” (W 6:323). This fact
explains why great historical figures do not impress us unduly. Indeed,
“in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says
of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner, feels to be true
of himself” (CW 2:5). The circumstances and manifestations may be
different, but the content and structure of success and failure, of desire
and disappointment, of virtue and vice, of regret and remorse are ex-
perienced similarly by king and commoner, prince and pauper. Riches
and poverty are but “a thick or thin costume”; fundamentally, “the life
of all of us [is] identical,” that is, the same depth of human experience
is available to each of us (W 6:323). Emerson’s claims exemplify what
Stanley Cavell calls the Romantic “discovery that the everyday is an
exceptional achievement . . . the achievement of the human.”21
Emerson’s appreciation of the value of everyday experience makes
him reject any form of contemptus mundi. In his early sermons he
already spoke against the notion that the Christian faith “puts . . .
contempt on outward things” or “teaches us . . . to despise the world”
(CS 2:244). The exemplary pastor “does not affect to hate the good
and the glory of this world” (CS 1:239). The goods of this world may
be inferior to the goods of the spirit, but the former should not be
suppressed to make way for the latter; instead, we should experience
the goods of this world as embodiments of spiritual laws. Metaphysi-
cally speaking, the world’s ontological status may be questionable, but
experience can be humanly enriching only on the assumption that the
world—this “other me” (CW 1:59)—is real. Experience is the process
through which the other loses part of its otherness and contributes to
the enlargement and deepening of the experiencer’s being. Experience
21. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 463.

Everyday Life 131
makes us more than what we were: “So much only of life as I know
by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and
planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion” (CW 1:59).
Experience is thus an obvious ingredient of the good life, and the more
challenging the otherness to be overcome and absorbed, the richer
the potential benefits for the self of the experiencer. For those able to
overcome their otherness, such challenges as “drudgery, calamity, exas-
peration, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom” (CW 1:59).
6
Nature
E merson’s ethics of nature is inseparable from questions con-

cerning the ontological status of nature, or, put differently,
concerning the nature of reality. Such questions gave rise to West-
ern philosophy, and they have proved inescapable ever since. The
Presocratics were preoccupied, in W. K. C. Guthrie’s words, “with
the nature of reality and its relation to sensible phenomena . . . the
relation between reality and appearance.” Determinations concerning
the status of the phenomenal world, debates about the degree to which
it was “real,” not only shaped the different Presocratic philosophies
but also, according to Guthrie, lost none of their significance in subse-
quent Greek thought: “In one form or another [they] constitute[d] the
fundamental difference between rival philosophies.”1 One need think
only of Aristotelian empiricism versus Platonic idealism, or of the
supernaturalism of Plotinus versus the materialism of the Epicureans.
As already suggested in the preceding chapter, questions concern-
ing the nature of reality and the reality of the extra-mental world
were of the utmost importance also to Emerson. He was, at times,
categorical in his answers, as in his introduction to the lecture series
on “Human Culture”: “Ideal is not opposed to Real, but to Actual.
The Ideal is the Real” (EL 2:217). But a dialectical thinker such as
Emerson could not long remain satisfied with such absolute, and
therefore abstract and ultimately empty, definitions. “The Ideal is the
Real” is the kind of speculative sentence whose subject continues to
defy conceptualization because, as Hegel pointed out, the predicate
absorbs the subject and becomes itself the subject in our thinking.
Put differently, the subject dissolves into its predicate so that the latter
1. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists, 4.
132
Nature 133
ceases to be predicative of the original subject and instead becomes

predicative of itself.2 Emerson’s statement thus amounts to little more
than saying that “the Real is the Real.” Rather than pursuing such
definitional blind alleys, Emerson searched for “a theory of nature”
(CW 1:8; emphasis added), thus resorting to a term whose funda-
mental meaning (Greek theōria: a looking at, a viewing) not only rever-
berates throughout his book Nature but also involves a perspectivism
suggesting intellectual openness. It is not surprising, therefore, that
although in Nature Emerson propounds an idealistic interpretation, he
stresses its provisional character: it is “merely . . . a useful introductory
hypothesis” (CW 1:38). An interpretation granting nature nothing more
than phenomenal status ultimately satisfies the human spirit as little
as it does the human heart (CW 1:37–38). Indeed, idealism is as likely
as materialism to cause man’s alienation from nature: it “makes nature
foreign to me” (CW 1:38).
Emerson’s ambivalent relationship to philosophical idealism,
much discussed during the past couple of decades,3 emerges not only
in his ontology and epistemology but also in his ethics. In other
words, the ontological status of nature and the degree and modes
of our knowledge of nature prove inseparable from Emerson’s ethical
arguments concerning nature. As will become apparent, those argu-
ments involve assumptions traceable to Emerson’s varying degrees of
commitment to philosophical idealism.
Emerson ethicizes the individual’s relation to nature by making
such morally relevant concepts as striving and desire part of his ideal
theory. He was able to do so in a philosophically meaningful way
because, as such scholars as Stanley Cavell, David Van Leer, and Rus-
sel B. Goodman have shown, of all the strains of idealism that affected
Emerson, the most important by far was the Kantian. Kant rejected
2. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 51–52.

3. Two helpful surveys are Lawrence Buell, “The Emerson Industry in the 1980’s,” es-
pecially section 3, “The De-Transcendentalization of the Emerson Image”; and Michael
Lopez, “De-Transcendentalizing Emerson.” Lopez himself has argued repeatedly for a
reconception of Emerson as a post-idealist thinker and has done so most impressively
in Emerson and Power. Arguments for Emerson as (pre-)pragmatist are found in, among
others, Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections; West, The
American Evasion of Philosophy; Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life; and Jacobson,
Emerson’s Pragmatic Vision. See also my Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe,
chapter 3, “The Critique of Idealism.”
what he considered to be the guiding principle of “all genuine ide-
alists, from the Eleatic School to Bishop Berkeley,” to wit, “All cogni-
tion through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion
(Schein), and only in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason
is there truth.” He condemned such influential expressions of this
view as Plato’s “visionary (schwärmerische)” idealism, the “sceptical”
idealism of Descartes, and the “dogmatic” idealism of Berkeley. Kant’s
critical idealism, by contrast, involves empirical realism. Kant did not
doubt the reality of the sensible world: it is part of our experience
and not a mere figment of our imagination; in fact, he pointed out,
even Descartes’s supposedly indubitable “inner experience . . . is pos-
sible only on the assumption of outer experience.” What Kant, as an
idealist, did insist on was the primacy of the mind in shaping our
knowledge of the external world: the mind inevitably structures the
data of the senses—what Kant calls the “manifold of sensation” (ein
Mannigfaltiges der Sinnlichkeit)—in accordance with its own laws. As
a result, “the order and regularity in the appearances we call nature
we ourselves introduce, and we would never be able to find them
there had not we, or the nature of our mind, originally put them there.”
The only external world we have access to is the world as we know
it, that is, the world as structured by the categories and rules of the
understanding. Emerson fully accepted this view, as is evidenced by
his untiring assertions of the correspondence of nature to the mind.
But like Kant’s, Emerson’s idealism also involved empirical realism.
As Goodman puts it, “Emerson wants both to assert the vast powers of
the human mind in forming our experience and to acknowledge the
objectivity or substantiality of the world that this mind encounters.”4
This duality within Kantian and Emersonian idealism creates a
space for ethical engagement. On the face of it, the idealism of both
Kant and Emerson seems to preclude any human responsibility for or
in relation to nature. The laws of the mind are what they are, and the
4. On striving as a moral concept, see Hartmann, Ethik, 236–42; for its moral signifi-
cance in relation to self-culture, see chapter 3 above. Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” The
Senses of “Walden,” 123–38, and “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” In Quest of the Ordinary,
27–49. Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology; Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and
the Romantic Tradition, 41–51. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen
Metaphysik, “Anhang,” Gesammelte Schriften, 4:374–75. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft
B 275, A 76/B 102, A 125 (emphasis added).
Nature 135
mind therefore inevitably “produces” in accordance with its laws the

structure or system we call nature. Does such a deterministic view leave
any room for human effort? Answering this question requires us to
remember that it is the transcendental subject (Kant’s “transcendental
unity of apperception”), not the empirical “I” (Kant’s “empirical ap-
perception” or “subjective unity of consciousness”) that is the ultimate
source of the laws to which nature conforms. This distinction is clearly
in Emerson’s mind when he describes the world as “the perpetual
creation of the powers of thought, of those that are dependent and of
those that are independent of your will” (CW 1:204). The powers of
thought independent of the will constitute, to use Kant’s phrase, “the
nature of our mind” (die Natur unseres Gemüths); they create a world
“not . . . now subjected to the human will” (CW 1:38). The empirical
“I,” on the other hand, is the locus of self-conscious experience; it is
the individual self thinking, willing, and acting, a self dependent for
its very existence on the world acknowledged by empirical realism.
In the argument with Descartes referred to above, Kant insists that
“empirically determined consciousness of my own existence” depends
on my “immediate consciousness of the existence of other things
outside me.” Ernst Cassirer clarifies Kant’s position thus: “Empirical
self-consciousness does not precede the empirical consciousness of
objects temporally and concretely; rather, in one and the same process
of objectification and determination the whole of experience is divided
for us into the field of the inner and the outer, the self and the world.”5
Enmeshed in the world of sensibilia, the empirical self becomes at one
and the same time aware of itself and of the world’s otherness. That
otherness challenges the self, and it is in the self’s various attempts to
come to terms with that otherness that moral questions arise.
Its very recognition of nature-as-other imbues the self with an aware-
ness of its own limits and of the limitations nature imposes upon its
freedom. As Schelling pointed out, our granting objective status to
anything amounts to accepting a restriction on our freedom.6 Hence
the self’s attempts to transcend its limits, to reassert its freedom. It
5. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 125, A 107/B 139, B 275–76. Ernst Cassirer,
Kant’s Life and Thought, 195.
6. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und
Kriticismus, letter 10, Werke, 1:264.
can do so by striving to overcome nature’s otherness, by extending its
dominion at the expense of nature’s. One important road toward this
goal is the study of nature. Knowledge of nature, Emerson suggests,
helps us overcome our alienation from nature because such knowledge
makes us increasingly recognize nature as an “other me” (CW 1:59).
At the very outset of his career as a lecturer, Emerson announced that
it was “the greatest office of natural science (and one which as yet is
only begun to be discharged) to explain man to himself” (EL 1:23).
Through studying nature and discovering its laws, the individual gains
insight into nature-as-structured-by-the-mind and thereby insight into
that mind itself. The fact that nature is a product of the human mind
is not, however, an immediate datum of individual consciousness, but
deeper insight into nature helps the individual become aware of “the
identity of nature’s mind, and man’s” (EL 2:34).
The role played by understanding and knowledge in the gradual
identification of self with nature, and thus in overcoming the alien-
ation of self from nature, illustrates the principle that “all knowledge is
assimilation to the object of knowledge” (CW 1:131–32), a principle
clarified by Hegel’s ampler definition: “Every form of understanding
is indeed an identification of the I and the object, a reconciliation of
entities that remain separate outside this understanding; what I do not
understand, what I do not know, remains to me something alien and
other.”7 Emerson did not believe, however, that as far as the individual
mind and nature were concerned, this identification could ever be
complete. The meaning of nature is inexhaustible; not even “the wisest
man [can] extort all her secret” (CW 1:9). This means, ipso facto, that
not even “the wisest man” will ever sound the depths of the human
mind: “so much of nature as [man] is ignorant of, so much of his
own mind does he not yet possess” (CW 1:55). Realizing this lack of
self-knowledge is, of course, a provocation to endless striving to extort
nature’s secret or, if you will, to subjugate nature through knowledge
of its laws and thereby achieve deeper insight into the mind. Nature is
indeed “the work of a perfect mind but of one which [the individual]
can follow and evermore become” (EL 2:33).
M. H. Abrams has drawn attention to “the role of political-power
metaphors in Romantic treatments of the relation between subject
7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Werke, 13:433.
Nature 137
and object, mind and nature.”8 He quotes a passage from Fichte that
illustrates both the use of such metaphors and the fact that power over
nature is ultimately unattainable:
To subjugate all non-rational nature to himself, to rule over it

freely and according to his own law, is the ultimate goal of man—
an ultimate goal which is utterly unattainable. . . . His way to it
must be endless . . . and therefore his true vocation as man, that
is as a rational but finite and as a sensuous but free being, is to
approximate this goal unto infinity.9
Political-power metaphors were often in Emerson’s mind when he

discussed the individual’s relation to nature. He often conceived of
man’s role as exerting “dominion” over nature, “extort[ing] from na-
ture its sceptre,” or “subduing” nature by thought (CW 1:25, 152,
106). In the Divinity School “Address” Emerson inveighed against “this
eastern monarchy of a Christianity” (CW 1:82), but when expressing
man’s power over nature, he had no objection to orientally despotic
imagery: religion and ethics “put nature under foot”; indeed, man “is
to put Nature under his feet” (CW 1:35; JMN 5:146). Emerson, to be
sure, knew as well as Fichte that though man may win battles in his
conflict with nature, he will never win the war. But endless struggle
is to be welcomed as a warrant of power, since “power ceases in the
instant of repose” (CW 2:40). Michael Lopez has demonstrated in
great detail the importance in Emerson’s thought of “the belief that
conflict is necessary and, ultimately, creative.” Emerson, as Lopez puts
it, “conceived of the universe as a system of antagonisms, a discipline
for the strengthening . . . of the self.”10
Emerson further ethicizes the individual’s relation to nature by
characterizing that relation as informed by desire: “The advantage of
the ideal theory . . . is . . . that it presents the world in precisely that
view which is most desirable to the mind” (CW 1:36; emphasis added).
Desire (Begierde) was a momentous term in German idealism. Kant
8. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Lit-

erature, 357.
9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten,
lecture 1, Sämmtliche Werke, 6:299–300; quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism,
359 (I have adopted Abrams’s translation).
10. Lopez, Emerson and Power, 190.
defined “the faculty of desire” (das Begehrungsvermögen) as “the fac-
ulty . . . to cause, through one’s representations (Vorstellungen [“ideas”
in the phenomenal, non-Kantian sense of “ideas,” i.e., “mental im-
ages”]), the reality of the objects of these representations.” Desire thus
implies the ability or, at any rate, the intent to actualize the content
of one’s ideas. Or as J. N. Findlay puts it in reference to Hegel’s
concept of Begierde, desire is “the attitude which seeks to make external
things conform to our requirements.” The idealist thinker offering
the most fruitful parallel to Emerson’s ethics of nature is Schiller,
in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (Über naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung, 1795–96). Schiller describes the modern condition as one
of desire—desire for a lost unity, a lost harmony with nature, which
has its counterpart in a lost inner harmony, a loss of integration of
thought and sensation. No longer being real for us moderns, such
unity and harmony have become ideal (idealisch)—something we can
no longer experience but only strive to attain. As an object of striving,
Schiller says, unity becomes a “moral unity” (moralische Einheit). As
moderns we cannot escape from the condition of desire, not only
because we cannot help yearning for a state we have lost, but also
because that state is forever lost: we cannot possibly reachieve “naive”
unity with nature and “naive” integration of self. However, our endless
pursuit of an unattainable ideal puts us morally on a much higher
plane than those who “possessed” nature and thus were exempt from
desire and striving. “Naive” humans enjoyed a natural, hence limited
perfection; moderns strive endlessly to attain an ideal perfection. There
is “no question,” Schiller says, that it is the latter who enact the highest
purpose of humanity.11
I find no convincing evidence that Emerson had any detailed knowl-
edge of Schiller’s great treatise. I am using it only as an enlightening
parallel to Emerson’s ethics of nature. The similarities are both struc-
tural and thematic—structural, because both authors use the paradigm
original perfection-loss-attempted restoration; thematic, because both
authors give each member of their triadic structure a similar content.
Emerson also presents the modern condition as one in which the
11. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, “Vorrede,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:9n. J. N.
Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination, 96. Friedrich Schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung, Werke, 4:307–10.
Nature 139
human suffers from a loss of original harmony with nature and of

harmonious integration of self. Our present condition is one of inward
and outward disharmony: “The ruin or the blank, that we see when we
look at nature, is in our own eye. . . . The reason why the world lacks
unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with
himself” (CW 1:43). Emerson’s primordial man, by contrast, repre-
sented a state of perfect integration with nature. His emanative powers
had a reach recalling that of the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah:
“He was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his
overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon. . . . The
laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into
day and night, into the year and the seasons” (CW 1:42). Like Schiller,
Emerson holds that the original state confronts us moderns as an ideal
that is no longer attainable but that by eliciting our endless striving
makes our pursuit of it a moral pursuit, thereby lifting us morally to a
higher plane than those enjoying the original state. Emerson uses such
traditional religious terms as “purification of [the] soul” and “redemp-
tion of the soul” (CW 1:38, 43) to emphasize the inescapably moral
character of our quest for a vision of nature that would restore our
harmonious union with it. As Lee Rust Brown rightly says, Emerson’s
concern with opaqueness and transparency (“The axis of vision is not
coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent
but opake.”—CW 1:43) was not “merely epistemological,” but “also
practical and ethical.”12
There are two sides, however, to our current problem of alienation:
not only are we as humans alienated from nature, but nature is also
alienated from us. The redemption of the soul involves a correspond-
ing redemption of nature. Although, as Barbara Packer has reminded
us, Emerson holds that nature is akin to man by virtue of its having, like
man, its foundations in spirit,13 nature is, in words of Emerson already
quoted, “a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of
12. This general resemblance between Schiller and Emerson may arise from both
authors’ expressing one of the central preoccupations of the Romantic imagination—
what M. H. Abrams calls “The Circuitous Journey: Through Alienation to Reintegration”
(Natural Supernaturalism, 197–252). On Adam Kadmon, see Gershom Scholem, Kab-
balah, 130–31, 137–42; also Thurin, Emerson as Priest of Pan, 189, 217. Lee Rust Brown,
The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole, 47.
God in the unconscious” (CW 1:38). Or as Hegel put it so strikingly,
nature is “der Abfall der Idee von sich selbst,” “the defection of the Idea
from itself.”14 Emerson believes that as humans we have the duty to
“redeem” nature by imbuing it with mind and thereby making it more
like us.
Emerson’s position is all the more interesting in the light of Kant’s
insistence that one cannot have any duties to nature, that since nature
has instrumental value only (it exists for human benefit), all so-called
duties to nature are actually indirect duties to humankind. Destruction
of natural beauty is immoral, Kant says, not because it violates any duty
to nature but because we destroy things that others may find some use
for: one owes no consideration to things, but one ought to “consider
[one’s] neighbor” (in Ansehung anderer Menschen). Emerson disagrees
because for him nature has also intrinsic, not just instrumental, value.
Like Coleridge, he is committed to the “dignity” of nature; he urges
“reverence” for nature (CW 1:9). Terms like “dignity” and “reverence”
are meaningless to Kant unless used in relation to the moral law and
to persons as bearers of the moral law. For him, nature can never be
an object of reverence (Achtung). As he makes clear in the Critique of
Judgment, even the feeling of the sublime in nature is actually “respect
(Achtung) for our own vocation (Bestimmung) which we direct to an
object of nature through a certain subreption (confusing respect for
the idea of humanity in our own subject with respect for the object).”
Emerson, by contrast, is to be ranked among the thinkers who grant na-
ture, in Stephen Toulmin’s words, “honorary . . . citizenship in Kant’s
Kingdom of Ends, together with the dignity and respect appropriate
to that citizenship.”15 In sum, Emerson accepts that humans have
responsibilities toward nature.
14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften

im Grundrisse, Werke, 9:28.
15. Immanuel Kant, Vorlesungungen über Moralphilosophie, Gesammelte Schriften,
27:460. For Coleridge, see McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, 222. Kant,
Kritik der Urteilskraft §27, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:257. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to
Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature, 271. By “Kingdom of Ends”
(Reich der Zwecke) Kant means the ideal moral commonwealth humans should aspire
to create. Every rational being has the obligation to act “as if he were always, through
his maxims, a legislating member in the universal Kingdom of Ends” (Grundlegung zur
Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:438).
Nature 141
These responsibilities do not, on Emerson’s interpretation, include

modern ecological concerns. In The Environmental Imagination, Law-
rence Buell’s richly informative contribution to ecocriticism (defined
by Buell as “study of the relation between literature and environment
conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis”), we
are urged not to underrate Emerson’s “environmentalist achievement”
—his having taken, in Nature, “a great stride toward . . . [a] naturalism”
that called forth “a nature more substantialized than the neoclassic
cosmic abstraction called Nature.” But Buell admits that Emerson’s
“naturalism” remained a “religiophilosophical mode of reflecting on
nature” that “sacralized nature as humankind’s mystic counterpart.”
When all is said and done, Emerson is peripheral, if not irrelevant, to
Buell’s concerns. According to Buell himself, “the key figure” of the
American Renaissance “in [his] book’s scheme of things” is not Emer-
son but Thoreau. It was the latter who “enlisted . . . in the service of a
sacred environmentalist cause that [radicalized] the ruralist nostalgia
widespread in England and New England . . . by demanding that it be
taken seriously as a criterion for regulating social action.”16 Emerson’s
sense of responsibility for nature and the environment took a different
form: it emerged not as environmentalist activism but as pleas for an
appreciation and enhancement of their ideal and mind-like potential.
Emerson starts with the premise that nature is not just an incar-
nation of thought (of Spirit, Idea, or God), but that for us humans
it is a thought. On account of its complexity and universality, nature
cannot fall within the scope of perception but can only be an object of
thought. We perceive a few details or a small corner of nature and make
them “ideal” by integrating them with a larger whole that is accessible
only to thought. And not only is that larger whole inaccessible except
through thought, but as a concept it depends on thought, on a mind
thinking it. The individual may thus be said to create his or her world
by thinking it. This epistemological idealism has moral implications
since one is responsible for the quality of the world one creates.
Accordingly, the “best” world will be one raised to the level of our
“best” thought.
16. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture, 430n20, 117–18, 6, 211.
One way of accomplishing the enhancement of nature is through
moral action itself. Since ethics is “the practice of ideas, or the introduc-
tion of ideas into life” (CW 1:35), it inevitably affects the phenomenal
world, in which moral action (like all action) of necessity takes place.
The moral actor enhances the world not only by his or her trans-
formative effect upon phenomena (which involves imprinting them
with mind), but also by changing the quality, and hence the content,
of others’ perceptions of the world. “Every heroic act,” Emerson says,
“causes the place and the bystanders to shine” (CW 1:15). A righteous,
noble, or heroic action adds a moral dimension to our perception
of the environment in which it occurred. Our very enthusiasm for
remarkable achievements transfigures the natural settings associated
with them. In spite of the dilapidation and squalor of Iona, Dr. John-
son, remembering the island’s illustrious past, felt that he was treading
on “ground . . . dignified by wisdom, bravery, [and] virtue.”17 Emerson
was in full agreement with such sentiments. As he saw it, after the
heroic self-sacrifice of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans the
defile of Thermopylae is not just any pass in Thessaly but one sacred
to the moral imagination. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis,
of Tower Hill after the executions of Sir Harry Vane and Lord William
Russell (CW 1:15).
Another way of overcoming the world’s alienation from spirit is by
bringing it within the purview of our aesthetic sensibility. Our very
perception of beauty involves our making the world of appearances
conform to human values and ideals. Emerson emphasizes the pre-
dominant role of the human spirit in aesthetic experience and the
comparatively minor contribution of sensibilia, as when he says that
“the perception of Beauty is an office of the Reason” (EL 2:267). Beauty,
in order to be perceived as such, must of course appear and is thus
dependent upon sense experience, but what matters to Emerson is the
spirit’s transformative effect upon the data of the senses: beauty “is
the incessant creation of the spirit of man . . . places and materials
are indifferent to [the spirit] and subject to it . . . a beautiful soul
dwells always in a beautiful world” (EL 2:271). Such an aesthetic theory
stresses the harmonizing of self and world on the self’s terms, or, put
17. Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 135.

Nature 143
differently, the remolding of the world to make it fit the demands of

spirit. Perceiving the world as beautiful amounts to turning the realm
of sensibilia into raw material for the spirit’s self-objectification. By
imbuing the world with spirit, the perception of beauty makes it more
akin to us, more human.
What is true of the perception of beauty is a fortiori true of the
creation of art. Hegel said that art arose out of the spirit’s need to
reproduce itself in the outside world. By exteriorizing itself in art, the
spirit imposes its vision upon matter and thus creates an image of
itself-in-the-other, thereby not only attaining greater self-knowledge
but also raising the other to a higher level. In a world transformed by
art the spirit recognizes the “external reality of itself” (äußere Realität
seiner selbst).18 Emerson’s style may be less philosophical than Hegel’s,
but he held identical views. For him also, artistic creation amounts to
the individual transforming part of nature into his or her self-image.
Art is indeed “nature passed through the alembic of man.” Nature is the
artist’s means of objectifying his or her spirit, and this objectification
not only deepens the spirit’s self-knowledge (“the production of a
work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity”) but also
enhances nature by informing it with spirit (CW 1:16–17). Nature
transfigured by artistic creation ranks higher than nature perceived as
beauty precisely because the former is imbued with a higher degree of
human consciousness. Since “Nature is good, but Intellect is better,”
it follows that “the beauty of things . . . becomes a new, and higher
beauty, when expressed” (CW 4:36; 3:8). The ultimate aim is to
transform as much as possible of nature into this “higher beauty”
so as to make nature the truest possible image of the human spirit.
This aim is not as unattainable as might at first appear. Emerson’s
already mentioned refusal to distinguish between the fine and the
useful arts (CW 2:218) is symptomatic of the high value he puts on
the humanization of nature by whatever means. Although not unaware
of some of the horrors attendant upon industrialization (L 3:442),
Emerson stressed the positive results of human intervention in nature:
“See what a skilful and beneficent hand [man] has laid upon the globe.
Not finding the world in its original state sufficiently commodious,
18. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Werke, 13:51–52.

he has undertaken to alter and amend it. He may be said to keep
the world in repair” (EL 1:43). While environmentalists might worry
about railroads and factories defacing the landscape, Emerson tried to
justify them aesthetically by emphasizing that they were adaptations
of natural forces and hence recognizable, by a person of “deeper
insight,” as parts of “the Whole” (CW 3:11).19 Such views help explain a
remarkable fact about Emerson: as Leonard Neufeldt has pointed out,
Emerson “was virtually alone” among the literary figures of his time
“in his endorsement of the possibilities of technology and science
for the individual and the culture.”20 He applauded man’s physical
transformation of the nonhuman world as an expression of the un-
ending human effort to “tame the chaos” (CW 4:20), to make the
forces of nature more responsive to the human will. By the invention
of the steamship, for instance, the human is no longer at the mercy of
capricious winds but has turned natural forces into reliable aids (CW
1:11–12). By means of the useful arts, homo faber has indeed re-created
the world in his own image: “By the aggregate of these aids, how is the
face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon!”
(CW 1:12).
What ultimately informs this argument is Emerson’s pantheistic or
secularized reinterpretation of the old Christian idea that humans were
called upon to be God’s coworkers in completing the creation, an idea
found in such early authorities as Origen, Basil the Great, Gregory of
Nyssa, and Ambrose, and which Emerson himself repeatedly expressed
in his sermons.21 He says, for instance, that a grateful man “serves
[God’s] purposes in the Universe. . . . A grateful man is a fellow-worker
with God” (CS 1:135). Or elsewhere: “We are to be fellow workers
with God and every moment of life and every power we have is to
be spent in the effort to add to the vast amount of well being of the
whole” (CS 1:302). Completing God’s creation also means, of course,
19. For a fuller discussion of Emerson’s aesthetic argument, see Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 240–42, and Thomas
Krusche, R. W. Emersons Naturauffassung und ihre philosophischen Ursprünge, 176–78.
20. Leonard Neufeldt, The House of Emerson, 78–79.
21. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 547n3. For the Judeo-Christian legitimization of this
idea, see Luigi Zoja, Crescita e colpa: Psicologia e limiti dello sviluppo, 35. Further detail
is provided by Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in
Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 293–302.
Nature 145
completing oneself. The virtuous man, Emerson says, is not satisfied

with his mind as he finds it, but devotes himself to “making it what
it should be, [thus] recommending himself to the Supreme Being by
finishing his work after his design” (CS 4:132).
These ideas were absorbed into Emerson’s later thought. In his
version of pantheism, Nature is God striving toward self-awareness, a
condition that Nature achieves (though still incompletely) in human-
ity. Nature remains unconscious of its own striving until it reaches
the point of human self-awareness. The human, in other words, is
Nature having risen to consciousness. This ascent to consciousness is
the supreme fact in the cosmos, and Emerson resorts to a Hebraistic
superlative to state it: “The fact of facts is the termination of the world
in a man.” This is indeed “the last victory of intelligence” (CW 1:127).
In man and woman, nature’s unconscious purposiveness becomes
consciously purposive: unlike nature, unlike the worm in the verse
motto of Nature (CW 1:7), the human has the ability to conceive of
purposes and deliberately to select the means necessary to advance
their accomplishment. This ability entails the obligation to enhance
nature’s striving, not only by perfecting oneself, but also by making
nature conform to human purposiveness. As Nicolai Hartmann said, it
is part of our moral vocation to influence nature’s destiny, to become,
in fact, “co-creators of the world” (Mitschöpfer der Welt).22
Stephen Whicher was, I believe, the first scholar to point out that
Emerson’s moral position was at times akin to soft determinism.23
Unlike hard determinists, who trace all human decisions and actions
to causally necessary chains of antecedents, soft determinists, while
acknowledging the individual’s inescapable involvement in a deter-
ministic universe, insist that the individual nevertheless maintains the
power to act freely in and upon that universe. As a soft determinist
Emerson recognized, on the one hand, that in relation to nature the
individual’s freedom does not enable him or her to contravene causal
necessity, and on the other, that the individual can (and therefore
ought to) further and enhance nature’s tendencies. This distinction
explains the moral dimension of Emersonian meliorism. As he sees it,
meliorism is an incontrovertible fact of nature: “To meliorate is the law
22. Hartmann, Ethik, 440–41.

23. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, 172.
of nature.” There is room, however, for moral agency: “Men are valued
precisely as they exert onward or meliorating force” (W 6:140). Or
stated in greater detail: “The destiny of organized nature is amelio-
ration. . . . It is for man to tame the chaos . . . to scatter the seeds of
science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied” (CW 4:20).
A world thus “redeemed” would no longer be alienated from us. It
would be a world recognizably akin to us, and thereby it would satisfy
important demands of the spirit and the heart. Feeling at home in
one’s world is obviously a major constituent of the good life.
7
Literature
M . H. Abrams’s well-known classification of traditional critical

approaches is helpful toward defining Emerson’s general
attitude to literature.1 Emerson showed little or no interest in works
of literature as autonomous, self-sufficient entities (the critical orien-
tation Abrams labels “objective”) and comparatively little interest in
works of literature as representations of observable reality (Abrams’s
“mimetic” approach). He usually regarded literature as a means of
achieving certain effects on an audience and as an expression of an
authorial self (Abrams’s “pragmatic” and “expressive” orientations).
Although ethical considerations seem most obviously involved in the
perception of literature as “pragmatic,” Emerson was also very much
concerned with the ethics of self-expression. In addition, the very
lifeblood of literature—language itself—seemed to him to involve
important ethical questions, and it is these questions that demand
our attention first.
As the sine qua non of our humanity, language is inevitably affected by

and implicated in ethics. Language is as necessary to our self-awareness
as to our socialization. It mediates thought and articulates feeling,
and it enables us to share in and to contribute to human society
and culture. Language, in sum, is so central to self-realization and
relations with others as to be continually verging upon important
areas of ethics. Moreover, given his Spirit-Nature hierarchy and his
1. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 3–29.
147
recognition that language has its being in the world of space and
time, Emerson cannot but regard language as an inadequate, limited,
flawed instrument of spiritual expression. Nature, to be sure, “is the
symbol of spirit” (CW 1:17)—but only the symbol. That which is
symbolized transcends the symbol. This is all the more true when
nature is articulated as language and thus loses its universality. Every
language is culturally and historically specific, and every human using
it imposes upon it the additional limitations of his or her individuality.
The ways in which we as limited, imperfect individuals cope with the
inadequacies of language also fall within the purview of ethics.
Emerson urges that we try to approximate the universality of na-
ture in the language we use. Since “it is the universal nature which
gives worth to particular . . . things” (CW 2:4), we should strive for
a language that, though incapable of attaining universality, at least
suggests it. Only such a language will enable us to do some justice
to spirit when we attempt to express it. As Emerson sees it, one can
approach linguistic universality by fully accepting and putting into
practice the principle of the “immediate dependence of language upon
nature” (CW 1:20), that is to say, by using a language that is concrete
and picturesque, a language that is symbolic. Emerson knew as well as
Goethe and Coleridge that the symbol is rooted in concrete, objective
reality, and that consequently the symbolic potential of language de-
pends upon its also being rooted in such reality. He praised Goethe’s
writing because in it “you shall find no word that does not stand for
a thing” (JMN 5:133). The thing in its turn suggests meanings not
available except through the thing, which thus becomes symbol. True
poetry, Emerson says, “is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of
the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which
causes it to exist” (W 8:17). But while endlessly suggestive of meaning,
the symbol maintains its concrete identity. The figures in Goethe’s
“Helena” (an episode of Faust, Part Two, published separately) affect
the mind as “eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad,”
but they owe that effect to Goethe’s “desire that every word should be
a thing” (CW 2:19).
Such “natural”—concrete, picturesque, symbolic—language is “uni-
versal” because it alone can give us glimpses of universal spirit. For
this reason, Emerson calls it “the first language . . . [and] the last”
(CW 1:20), at once the most elemental and the supreme language,
Literature 149
and the only language shareable by all humans: “The same symbols
are found to make the original elements of all languages . . . [and] the
idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest
eloquence and power” (CW 1:19–20). The enemy of universality and
expressive integrity is abstract language. Exploiting once again the
original meaning of the term, Emerson regarded linguistic abstractness
(from Latin abstrahere: to pull away, to remove, to detach) as language
detached from its roots in nature and hence susceptible to artifice and
manipulation. His fear of abstraction led him to define “the education
of the mind” as “a continual substitution of facts for words” (JMN
4:327). He regarded concrete, picturesque language as “a commanding
certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth
and God” because “a man’s power to connect his thought with its
proper symbol . . . depends on the simplicity of his character, that is,
upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss.”
By contrast, abstract language—“this rotten diction”—evidences “the
corruption of man,” a corruption prevalent “in every long-civilized
nation” and consisting in the displacement of “simplicity and truth”
by “duplicity and falsehood” (CW 1:20).
There is obviously an element of primitivism in Emerson’s argu-
ment. In words reminiscent of Hamann’s “Poesie ist die Muttersprache
des menschlichen Geschlechts” (“poetry is the mother tongue of the
human race”), Emerson says that “as we go back in history, language
becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or,
all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols” (CW 1:19). Lan-
guage tends to lose its symbolic creativity and truthfulness in “long-
civilized nation[s]”: “new imagery ceases to be created, and old words
are perverted to stand for things which are not” (CW 1:20). Emerson
here deepens the moral significance of his argument by linking it with
Plato’s The Sophist: “things which are not” literally translates “ta mē
onta,” which Plato uses repeatedly to refer to falsehood in thought or
speech. Emerson further emphasizes the fraudulent nature of abstract
language by echoing a passage from Goethe’s brief essay “Symbolik,”
where the value of words is discussed in monetary terms. Goethe
distinguishes between coins made of precious metals and “paper
money” (Papiergeld), and points out that whereas the former have
inherent value (Realität), the latter’s value is purely conventional (nur
Konvention). In Emerson’s version, “a paper currency is employed when
there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and
words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections”
(CW 1:20).2
Abstract language corrupts by shielding both speaker and hearer
from reality. Language is an instrument of self-knowledge, but it can
function as such only if it concretely and authentically articulates our
experience. The prelinguistic self is chaotic and formless; language
attempts to structure, grasp, and reveal it. Language is not only “the
finest tool of all”; it is also the tool “nearest to the mind” (W 7:163).
Although language, rooted as it is in nature, is “material,” it is “ma-
terial only on one side. It is a demi-god,” and thus capable, to some
degree, of grasping and giving voice to one’s spiritual self. The self
“struggles to the birth,” and its release from chaos brings the joy of self-
realization. That is why speech “is a great pleasure . . . [that] cannot
be foreborne” (W 7:43, 38). Abstract, generalized language, however,
masks us from ourselves and thus causes alienation. In a sense, this
problem results from the very nature of language. Language, after all,
is something we inherit from our culture, and we cannot achieve full
human status without initiation into the language of our culture—a
process charmingly described by St. Augustine in his Confessions.3 This
also means, however, that no language truly expresses any person’s
unique self: there simply is no language that is entirely one’s own, or
to put it in Wittgensteinian terms, there is no “private language.”4 The
self experiences self-separation or alienation because in its attempts to
realize its subjectivity it of necessity objectifies itself: in the very act of
expressing itself, the self necessarily exteriorizes itself into an objective
system not of its own creation. As Emerson points out, developing an
idea of Coleridge, “The very language we speak, thinks for us, by the
subtle distinctions which already are marked for us by its words, and
every one of these is the contribution of the wit of one and another
sagacious man, in all the centuries of time” (EL 1:229–30; JMN 5:9).
2. Johann Georg Hamann, Kreuzzüge des Philologen, Sämtliche Werke, 2:197. Plato,
Sophistēs 238B, 240D–241A, 260C. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Symbolik,” Gedenkaus-
gabe, 16:855. For a useful introduction to the entire problematic of language versus
truth, see Harald Weinrich, Linguistik der Lüge.
3. St. Augustine, Confessions 1.8 (13).
4. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungens 1.199, 243, 269, 275. For a subtle
discussion of Wittgenstein’s argument, see Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 343–54.
Literature 151
This statement points both to the problem and to its partial solu-
tion. We have to personalize our language by contributing and putting
into practice our own “subtle distinctions.” One way of achieving this
creative appropriation of language is to engage in what Coleridge
called “desynonymizing.” Coleridge claimed that “all Languages
perfect themselves by a gradual process of desynonymizing words orig-
inally equivalent.”5 Emerson applauded Coleridge’s efforts at desyn-
onymization because he grasped its significance for ethics:
Is not this the history of all advancement? We look at good & ill
which grows together as indissolubly connected: if an improve-
ment takes place in our own mind we get a glimpse of an almost
imperceptible line that separates the nature of the thing from the
evil admixture. By a more diligent inspection that division will
farther appear, till it peals off like dead bark. This is the sense of
Coleridge’s urged distinction between the similar & the same. . . .
this is the progress of every soul. What it joined before it now
severs. . . . All our knowledge comes in this way. (JMN 3:209)
Abstract language not only shields the user from essential reality
but also corrupts those hearing or reading it. Generalizations, eu-
phemisms, clichés, and vagueness relieve the speaker or writer from
the obligation to think clearly about the subject under consideration
(thus concealing its real meaning even from him or herself, as Orwell
famously pointed out in “Politics and the English Language”), but they
also prevent the audience from facing realities that demand ethically
informed decisions and actions. Even after his infamous Seventh of
March (1850) speech in support of the Fugitive Slave Bill, Daniel
Webster kept assuring the nation that it was enjoying the fruits of
liberty. Emerson reacted sharply to Webster’s abuse of the language:
I opened a paper today in which he pounds on the old strings

in a letter to the Washington Birth Day feasters at N.Y. “Liberty!
liberty!” Pho! Let Mr. Webster for decency’s sake shut his lips
once & forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of
Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.
(JMN 11:345–46)
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks, 3:4397; see also Biographia Literaria,
1:82–83, and Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination, 148–49. For Coleridge’s
desynonymization of ethical terms, see Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism, 68–69.
“Liberty!” is a slogan whose very emptiness assures its anodynic effect.
Emerson found “nothing . . . more disgusting than this crowing about
liberty by slaves, as most men are” (W 6:23). Wesley T. Mott has
drawn attention to Emerson’s deep awareness that the corrupting
effect of language involves a shift from concreteness (“words that are
things”) to abstractness (“the word-as-artifact”).6 Words-as-artifacts
are “abstracted” from any moral reality and therefore can be made
to signify almost anything. Emerson comments most caustically on
such immoral use of language in a speech delivered in 1856:
Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant. Representa-

tive Government is really misrepresentative; Union is a conspiracy
against the Northern States which the Northern States are to have
the privilege of paying for; the adding of Cuba and Central America
to the slave marts is enlarging the area of Freedom. Manifest Destiny,
Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing. . . . They call it
Chivalry and Freedom; I call it the stealing all the earnings of a
poor man and the earnings of his little girl and boy. . . . But this
is Union, and this is Democracy; and our poor people, led by
the nose by these fine words, dance and sing, ring bells and fire
cannon, with every new link of the chain which is forged for their
limbs by the plotters in the Capitol. (W 11:259–60)
These remarks of Emerson’s on the troubled American 1850s echo

those of his admired Thucydides on even more troubled late-fifth-
century (BCE) Greece. Like Emerson, Thucydides witnessed “moral
degradation in time of stress,” and a salient feature of such degradation
was “the slippage and corruption of an entire moral language.”7
Apart from expressing his disgust at such flagrant violations of
ethico-linguistic integrity, Emerson also confronts the lack of “truth”
in language as such. As already indicated, he associated truth with
simplicity and simplicity with unity (CW 1:20; CS 2:175), thereby re-
calling the Latin meaning of simplex (one, uncompounded). Language,
on the other hand, he perceived to be inherently duplex (twofold, dou-
ble) and therefore incapable of doing justice to something as “simple”
as truth. The “law [of] Ethics,” we remember, “cannot yet be stated,
it is so simple” (EL 1:370). Statement involves analysis, separation,
6. Wesley T. Mott, “The Strains of Eloquence”: Emerson and His Sermons, 111–12.
7. Thucydides, Historiai 3.82.4–8; Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 404.
Literature 153
differentiation, and hence destruction of unity and simplicity. Words

“break, chop, and impoverish [truth]” (CW 1:28). Put differently, what
remains undifferentiated, one, simplex is inaccessible to the selectivity,
distinctions, and emphases inherent in statement. “The thought we
express” is, therefore, always “partial & finite” (JMN 5:30; emphasis
added). Emerson would have relished Schiller’s paradox: “Spricht die
Seele so spricht ach! schon die Seele nicht mehr” (“When the soul
speaks, then it is, alas, no longer the soul that speaks”).8 Defection
from simplicity, unity, and truth is inherent in even the highest modes
of expression: “Art expresses the one or the same by the different.
Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety,
that is, always by an object or symbol” (CW 4:32).
Confronted with the inadequacy of language, Emerson sometimes
urges silence. As he states in his essay “Intellect,” “There is somewhat
more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. . . . If I speak, I
define, I confine, and am less. . . . Silence is a solvent that destroys
personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal” (CW 2:202–
3). At other times he counsels patience and acceptance of the fact
that one’s expressive power will fail to do justice to the “Things of
the heavenly mind” (“Merops,” W 9:127–28). Most interestingly, he
advocates the use of as transparent as possible a language because
such a language he feels to be least likely to distort spiritual truth. The
ideal of linguistic transparency is not necessarily incompatible with
Emerson’s commitment to symbolism. In his theory, the symbol is
far less opaque than it is in the interpretations and literary practice
of, say, Goethe, Coleridge, or Melville—authors whose symbolizing
seems to be an unending reaching for meanings. Goethe’s sense of
the opaqueness of the symbol is evident from a statement such as
“Symbolism transforms . . . the idea into an image in such a way
that the idea always remains infinitely active and unattainable in the
image, and would remain inexpressible even though expressed in all
languages.”9 Emerson, by contrast, stresses transparency: “A happy
symbol is a sort of evidence that your thought is just” (W 8:13).
Moreover, he implies that the very radiance of thought blinds us to
8. Friedrich Schiller, “Tabulae votivae,” Werke, 3:145.

9. Johan Wolfgang Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen [no. 1113], Gedenkausgabe,
9:639.
the symbol: “As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the
earth, so the poet turns the world to glass” (CW 3:12). As Vivian C.
Hopkins has pointed out, “in Emerson’s theory, the most successful
symbol would leave with the observer a dominant impression of spirit,
independent of material shape, color, or sound.”10 In other words, what
Emerson values in poetry is the thought rather than the artistry. Poets,
he says, “live . . . to the beauty of the symbol,” but “wise men . . . live
above the beauty of the symbol, to the beauty of the thing signified.”
The latter have “spiritual perception,” whereas the former have merely
“taste” (JMN 5:326). Although language cannot possibly convey the
purity of “spiritual perception,” the best language, it seems clear, is the
one most capable of “giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual
expansion to every truth” (CW 4:49). Such a language provides scope
(“expansion”) for the articulation of thought and permits the highest
degree of expressive truthfulness: it is thus indeed “ethico-intellectual.”
II
The literary expression of truth is, in Emerson’s view, inseparable

from literary self-expression. Only the self can conceptualize and give
voice to truth, and the highest attainable self-expression, which is the
prerogative of genius, is also the highest expression of truth. Hence
Emerson’s oft-repeated insistence that genius is always moral. There
is, he writes in 1827, “between virtue & genius a natural an eternal
affinity” (JMN 3:71). Years later his uncertainties about Goethe’s moral
standing induced him to doubt whether Goethe had indeed “ascended
to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken” (CW 4:163).
Genius involves a “sharpness of moral perception” that Emerson
found lacking in Goethe (JMN 7:367). As a result, Goethe was a
“lawgiver of art” rather than a true artist (CW 4:165). Anyone familiar
with Goethe’s works is likely to quarrel with Emerson’s judgments,
but Emerson’s attitude reveals the depth of his conviction that, as he
was still insisting in the late 1860s, “genius [is] always on the side
of morals” (JMN 16:84). In fact, “every work of pure genius . . . is
10. Vivian C. Hopkins, “The Influence of Goethe on Emerson’s Aesthetic Theory,”

333.
Literature 155
charged” not only with beauty, but also with “goodness, and truth”
(EL 3:81).
This moral dimension of genius also guarantees that genius will
remain true to itself. The enemy of genius is convention. Genius re-
quires authenticity and sincerity, and these involve the abandonment
of one’s conventional self and fidelity to one’s intuitional, inspired
self. Genius comes into its own only “when all limits are taken away;
which only can happen in the case of morality.” It is morality that
gives genius its foundation in the noumenal world, and therefore
morality is truly “the only ground on which genius can build” (JMN
12:400). Emerson’s approach to literature, needless to say, is never
purely aesthetic. Although he praises the imagination as “the great
awakening power,” as the perceiver and creator of beauty, he insists
that it is “the Morals” that are “creative of genius” (W 6:302–3; 7:212).
In an early lecture called “Literature,” he makes exactly the same claim,
though in different words: “It is in the nature of things that the highest
originality must be moral” (EL 3:205). In view of such claims, it is
not surprising that Emerson regarded originality more as a moral
obligation than as a literary desideratum. Any literary production
“not entirely & peculiarly” your own work, Emerson wrote in 1834,
addressing himself, “is so much lost time to you. . . . It is a parenthesis
in your genuine life. You are your own dupe” (JMN 4:335). Obviously,
in literature, as in life, “integrity . . . dwarfs talent” (W 6:277).
Obedience to one’s genius has implications for one’s attitude toward
one’s culture or society. The “poet” or “scholar” cannot “become
acquainted with his thoughts” unless he maintains his spiritual inde-
pendence (CW 1:109). Inspired by Goethe’s example, Emerson notes
in 1836: “In the scholar’s Ethics, I would put down Beharre wo du
stehst. Stick by yourself” (JMN 5:187–88).11 This independence of
spirit, which Emerson often metaphorizes as solitude or silence, is
also a major theme of what he called his “little poem on poetical
ethics called Saadi” (L 3:88). Though Saadi “loved the race of men,” he
“sit[s] aloof” and “dwells alone” (W 9:130). Spiritual independence,
the kind of self-trust to which Emerson in “The American Scholar”
ascribes “all the virtues,” makes it possible for the poet or scholar
11. Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen [no. 549], Gedenkausgabe, 9:570.

to exercise “the highest functions of human nature”—to fulfill his
duties as “Man Thinking,” instead of allowing himself to be reduced
to the level of “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other
men’s thinking” (CW 1:62–63, 53). In a book produced by Man
Thinking one encounters an authentic human being rather than the
embarrassed mouthpiece of common, unoriginal thoughts. In great
works of literature, the human being and the writer show themselves
to be “one & not diverse” (JMN 5:425). Talent and literary skill “cannot
make a writer. There must be a man behind the book” (CW 4:162).
This conviction helps explain Emerson’s tireless insistence that lit-
erature be rooted in personal experience. One may recall his eloquent
critique of the luckless Barzillai Frost, the preacher who, as far as one
could tell from his sermons,
had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had

laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or
cheated, or chagrined. . . . This man had ploughed, and planted,
and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had
eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles
and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse,
that he had ever lived at all. (CW 1:86)
Not rooted in his life, Frost’s preaching was, literally, lifeless. He had
never learned the truth that, as Emerson puts it in “Literary Ethics,”
“human life . . . is . . . the richest material for [the scholar’s] creations”
(CW 1:111). Or as we are told in his most famous address on the
subject of literature, “the scholar loses no hour which the man lives”
(CW 1:61). Only true, sincere encounters with oneself and one’s life
experience can produce the moral and emotional depth and richness
required for the creation of great literature. Unfortunately, most poets
would rather not encounter their true self or confront what is deeply
and perhaps disturbingly human in their experience. They prefer the
self-unawareness guaranteed by “a civil and conformed manner of
living,” and they write poems “from the fancy, at a safe distance from
their own experience” (CW 3:3). And yet, only he that truly and sin-
cerely “writes to himself, writes to an eternal public” (CW 2:89). When
one dares to confront and honestly express one’s deepest humanity,
one speaks for all humans. All great literature is, therefore, essentially
autobiographical, and it is so in a dual sense: it is the autobiography
Literature 157
of the author and the autobiography of humankind. As Emerson says

about one of his heroes, “Dante’s praise is, that he dared to write his
autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality” (CW 3:21).
Emerson’s concern with the ethical dimension of literature is
equally apparent from the fact that in his own authorial practice he
was primarily committed to what one might loosely call “wisdom
literature.” At the age of twenty-one he expressed his admiration for
books that “embody the wisdom of their times & so mark the stages
of human improvement.” As examples he mentioned “the Proverbs of
Solomon, the Essays of Montaigne, & eminently the Essays of Bacon,”
and he gave voice to an ambition that more than any other shaped
the course of his career as a writer: “I should like to add another
volume to this valuable work” (JMN 2:265). One might argue that
Emerson’s entire oeuvre embodies his endeavor to add such a volume
to the world’s literature. The primary role of wisdom, as he saw it, was
an ethical one. Wisdom helps us answer correctly the fundamental
questions of ethics: “What must I do?” and “How shall I live?” It was
thus natural for him to claim that the highest kind of literature is that
which teaches moral wisdom. He invariably insisted that “the very
highest class of books are those which express the moral element,”
which deal with “what ought to be” (EL 3:202–3). The greatest poetry
is oriented toward ethics, and the supreme poets are invariably moral
lawgivers (JMN 5:476; W 8:64–65).
The Shakespeare of Representative Men obviously fails on this point,
but Emerson was too sincere an admirer of Shakespeare’s genius to
fully adopt any ethico-poetical criterion that would exclude the Bard
from the ranks of the supremely great. Emerson’s “ethical poetry,”
in other words, is a rich and flexible concept (though, as already
indicated, not flexible enough to allow a wholehearted appreciation
of Goethe’s work). As he puts it in “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” “in
the voice of Genius I hear invariably the moral tone, even when it
is disowned in words” (W 10:185). Such a statement also contains
an element of Emersonian self-justification. The iconoclast of the Di-
vinity School “Address” and the moral antinomian of “Self-Reliance”
preached a deeper, Reason-sanctioned morality that was inaudible
to those who listened with the ears of the Understanding and who
consequently took offense at his words. To Emerson’s delight, Bronson
Alcott perceived a similar dichotomy between the words and the real
message of Emerson’s Poems (1846): “Alcott, among many fine things
he said of my volume of Poems, said, the sentiment was moral and
the expression seemed the reverse” (JMN 9:464).
Emerson considered his desire to excel as a moral writer to be a sign
of his literary modernity. Although “from the beginning” the highest
literature had been ethical, all past attempts to translate essential ethics
into statement had but produced works that were partial and fragmen-
tary. Humanity still craves “the true poetry,” the real “Moral Poem” of
which even Jesus “chanted . . . only stanzas”; it is “the tendency of
the ripe modern mind to produce it” (JMN 5:476). Emerson clearly
considered himself a representative of that modern tendency. His
stressing the superiority of ethical to imaginative literature aligned him
with those among his contemporaries who claimed that art (including
literary art) could no longer adequately express the needs of the mod-
ern spirit and that only “philosophy” (comprehensively conceived:
ethics, criticism, sociology, etc.) could do so. One need think only of
Macaulay’s claim, in his essay on Milton (1825), that “as civilisation
advances, poetry almost necessarily declines”; of Hegel’s insistence
that for us moderns art has ceased to be the highest mode of the Spirit’s
self-realization; of Carlyle’s “mean opinion of creative literature”; or
of Matthew Arnold’s conviction that what his age needed most was
“criticism,” that is, “the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge . . .
to see the object as in itself it really is.” As was the case in England, so
also in nineteenth-century America, Lawrence Buell points out, some
of the most disconcerting detractions of the literary arts came from the
artists themselves. Buell cites as examples Bryant, who “at the moment
he was being heralded as a symptom of American poetic emergence,
suggested that poetry was obsolete,” and Lowell, whose enthusiasm
for the nation’s poetic aspirations may be judged from the statement
that “we can . . . borrow a great poet when we want one.”12
Like these important nineteenth-century figures, Emerson accepted
the dethronement of imaginative literature: “The very highest class of
books are those which express the moral element, the next, works of
12. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 1:153; Hegel, Vor-
lesungen über die Ästhetik, Werke, 13:141–42; for Carlyle, see Walter E. Houghton, The
Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870, 130; Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer,
lecture 2, and “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” The Complete Prose Works
of Matthew Arnold, 1:140; 3:258–85; Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From
Revolution through Renaissance, 64.
Literature 159
imagination, and the next, works of sciences.” Works of science rank

lowest because their conclusions are always provisional, that is, always
subject to revision as a result of new evidence, new “facts,” new inter-
pretations; works of science, in other words, deal with “what appears.”
Works of imagination rank higher because, when rightly conceived,
they deal with “what really is.” At their best, works of imagination
represent the Spirit and its ideas (Latin imago translates Greek idea):
they “ascend to that power of thought that the writer sees Nature
as subordinate to the soul and uses it as his language” (EL 3:202–
3, 207). When falling short of this achievement, works of imagination
are merely works “of costume or of circumstance” (W 12:375). One
remembers in this context Emerson’s lack of enthusiasm for almost
all works of fiction. But even the greatest works of imagination, which
deal with “what really is,” are inferior to moral works, whose subject is
“what ought to be” (EL 3:203). This ranking constitutes an interesting
literary parallel to Emerson’s Kantian privileging of the pure practical
over the theoretical reason (discussed in chapter 2).
Emerson is unKantian, however, in his manner of treating ethics: he
approaches this subject, like every other, undogmatically and without
any pretensions to systemic completeness. He belongs with those
modern thinkers whom Richard Rorty has characterized as “edifying”
rather than “systematic.” Edifying thinkers are less concerned with
“truth” or with “getting the facts right” than with “finding new, better,
more interesting, more fruitful ways” of expressing ourselves, and
“thus of coping with the world.” Edifying discourse is “abnormal”:
it aims “to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to
aid us in becoming new beings.” Rorty places the “edifying” thinkers
in their appropriate historical context:
On the periphery of the history of modern philosophy, one finds

figures who, without forming a ‘tradition,’ resemble each other in
their distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of
essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey,
the later Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, are figures of this sort.13
Emerson has been repeatedly associated with each of these figures,

and with Nietzsche, whom Rorty also includes among the edifying
13. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 366, 359–60, 367.
thinkers.14 Indeed, much of what Rorty says concerning edifying
thinkers almost reads like a characterization of Emerson’s aims and
methods as a thinker.
The most obvious literary result of Emerson’s being an “edifying”
thinker is the fact that he wrote not moral treatises, but moral essays. He
turned to the essay because its generic characteristics made it an ideal
vehicle for the disruption of dogmatic, traditional, or conventional
patterns of thought. The essay, after all, is by definition experimental,
antisystematic, open-ended, and skeptical; it is, as Joel Porte aptly
calls it, “that tentative and fragmentary record of the mind in search
of its meaning.”15 All of these characteristics Emerson saw amply
displayed in the work of one of his intellectual heroes, who also
happened to be the creator of the modern essay—Montaigne. And
it seems clear in Emerson’s as well as in Montaigne’s case that the
generic requirements of the essay substantively affected the ethic that
both authors propound. As Gustave Lanson put it in a classic study
of Montaigne’s ethics, “from start to finish, the Essais exorcise the
phantom of absoluteness”; the morality they present “is not a doctrine,
but an art . . . a creative activity.”16
Equally important, however, is the fact that choosing the essay as a
vehicle for self-expression has moral implications of its own. Foremost
among these is the writers’ duty to maintain their intellectual inde-
pendence vis-à-vis their own utterances. One should accept one’s own
statements or texts as always tentative, inchoate, provisional. Every
statement has instrumental rather than intrinsic value: its function is
not to say anything final but to provoke a new utterance. True essayists
maintain their authorial integrity by avoiding dogmatism and embrac-
ing instead a “position of perpetual inquiry” (CW 1:115). Their words
should always suggest “undiscovered regions of thought” (CW 1:41).
Principles like these led Emerson to claim that “in composition the
What is of no importance compared with the How” (JMN 5:304–5).
The author must subject the “What” to the free play of his or her
mind, to an endlessly dynamic dialectic, in order to maintain the
14. Ibid., 369.

15. Porte, Representative Man, xii.
16. Gustave Lanson, “La Vie morale selon les Essais de Montaigne,” Essais de méthode,
de critique et d’histoire littéraire, 176–77.
Literature 161
spiritual and intellectual creativeness that is the unceasing duty of

Man Thinking.
III
A way of expressing oneself that does justice to moral thought is

of the utmost importance not only to the writer but also to his or
her audience. Like every other moralist, Emerson understood that
having moral insights brought with it the duty to communicate them.
Moralists believe that nothing concerns humans more centrally, more
deeply, or more universally than ethics. Obviously, moralists who kept
their insights to themselves would be acting unethically by depriving
others of those insights. Moralists recognize that whatever benefits
they themselves may derive from the communication of their insights
(benefits such as deepening or clarifying their thought in the process
of articulating it), their real duty consists in making their insights
available to others.17 What his age truly needs, Emerson says, is “a
moral Education.” The writer should become the teacher of the age,
occupying “himself in the study & explanation of the moral consti-
tution of man more than in the elucidation of difficult texts.” Such a
writer-teacher will not be concerned with “conciliating [his] audience”;
his real aim will be “to edify them” (JMN 4:327, 93–94, 335).
Emerson shared with his fellow Romantics the conviction that “the
moral improvement of audience [is] a primary end” of literature.18 Al-
though neither in thought nor in method an exponent of conventional
didacticism, he strongly believed that “the whole use in literature
is the moral” (JMN 10:22). To the right reader, true literature is in-
deed “a decalogue” (W 10:273). Such convictions help explain Emer-
son’s frequently resorting to imperatives or to a generally “legislative”
rhetoric. Though his voice was less dithyrambically or thunderously
assertive than that of such “prophets” as Blake, Shelley, or Carlyle,
his favorite rhetorical stance toward his audience, nevertheless, was
that of a teacher urging, recommending, advising, or cautioning. As
17. In this argument I follow Hösle, Die Krise der Gegenwart und die Verantwortung
der Philosophie, 244.
a clergyman addressing sermons to his congregation, he adopted this
stance as a matter of course; but one need only think of such key
works as “The American Scholar,” “Man the Reformer,” “Self-Reliance,”
and The Conduct of Life to realize how strongly “legislative” Emerson
remained. Cicero said that the best kind of speaker informs, pleases,
and persuades his audience (“Optimus est enim orator, qui dicendo
animos audientium et docet et delectat et permovet”).19 As a moral
legislator, Emerson is interested only in the third of the three oratorical
functions identified by Cicero. For Emerson, “speech is power: speech
is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his
bad sense into your good sense” (W 8:92).
The true teacher—that is, the “poet” or “scholar” in Emerson’s
sense of these terms—derives his authority from the fact that he is
an exponent of the Absolute, which he has the duty to interpret for
the benefit of others. As we learn from “Literary Ethics,”
The man of genius should occupy the whole space between God or
pure mind, and the multitude of uneducated men. He must draw
from the infinite Reason, on one side; and he must penetrate into
the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other. From one, he must
draw his strength; to the other, he must owe his aim. . . . At one
pole, is Reason; at the other, Common Sense. If he be defective
at either extreme of the scale, his philosophy will seem low and
utilitarian; or it will appear too vague and indefinite for the uses
of life. (CW 1:113)
Emerson often stresses this mediating function of the writer of genius.

Although it is true that for his integrity’s sake a person of genius cannot
afford to “travel . . . with the souls of other men . . . in the daily, time-
worn yoke of their opinions,” it is equally true that from time to time
he must “descend” into the crowd as a benefactor (W 6:156). This
“descending,” this making one’s thought available to others, requires
talent. Emerson often disparaged talent in comparison with genius,
but he also recognized that no person of genius can fulfill his or her
“edifying” function without talents, which are “the feet and hands of
genius.” He repeatedly confronted the tragedy of genius failing “for
want . . . of a little talent,” most notably perhaps in the person of his
19. Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum 1.3.

Literature 163
friend Bronson Alcott (W 10:276). Pure genius dwells in the realm of

the Reason; communication with others requires skills on the level of
the Understanding; hence, the more talent one has, the more effective
one’s communication. As Coleridge put it in a book with which
Emerson was familiar, “Genius must have talent as its complement
and implement.”20 Cultivating one’s talents is consequently a moral
obligation not only for reasons of self-realization, but also in order to
enable one to become effective as a spokesperson for higher values.
The writer has the further duty of helping us overcome our alien-
ation, our “not-feeling-at-home” in our world. By conceptualizing,
interpreting, and expressing our environment, the poet deepens our
awareness of it and helps us to see it as a reflection of our own being,
thus showing us how pervasively “human” our world is and thereby
attenuating our estrangement from it. One of Goethe’s greatest merits
consisted in his having developed a theory of nature in which “poetry
and humanity remain to us” (CW 4:158). The need for humanization
is not confined to nature, however. In “The Poet,” Emerson complains
that as Americans we have not yet addressed ourselves “with sufficient
plainness, or sufficient profoundness . . . to life . . . [to] our own times
and social circumstance.” No poet has yet arisen who “knew the value
of our incomparable materials” and recognized “the barbarism and
materialism of the times” as a necessary stage in the dialectic of human
self-realization (CW 3:21).
Emerson was always keenly aware of the contradiction at the heart
of American cultural experience and the alienation resulting from it.
He put our problem most sharply in “The Young American”: “Our
people have their intellectual culture from one country, and their
duties from another. Our books are European. . . . We are sent to a
feudal school to learn democracy. . . . [Our] institutions . . . [are] not
consecrated to [our] imagination nor interpreted to [our] understand-
ing” (CW 1:222). A major responsibility of American literature is
to help us overcome our alienation by articulating, through content
and form, our experience and thus satisfy our need for national self-
expression, without which there can be no real national self-definition
20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 2:244. Emerson annotated his copy of this work (Harding, Emerson’s Library,
64). See also JMN 5:52 and n162.
and self-knowledge. Foreign or foreign-inspired literature cannot pos-
sibly satisfy these needs of the American soul: such literature provides
us with voices and models that do not fit our experience. As Emerson
warns in “The American Scholar,” “The millions that around us are
rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign
harvests” (CW 1:52). As the prophetic voice of his people, the poet
has the duty to deepen their consciousness of what it really means
to be human in their time and place, and he can do so by expressing
for them America and American experience in an American idiom.
Whitman, more than anyone else, came close to being that much-
expected American poet, as Emerson intermittently recognized. “One
must thank Walt Whitman,” he wrote in 1863, “for service to American
literature in the Appalachian enlargement of his outline & treatment”
(JMN 15:379).
The writer’s most important other-directed duty, however, is sug-
gested by Emerson’s statement, in an 1841 essay in The Dial, that “lit-
erature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his
condition” (W 12:341). Emphatically and repeatedly, Emerson insists
that the poet or scholar should bring hope, consolation, and joy, that,
in the words of “The American Scholar,” “the office of the scholar” is
not only “to guide men,” but also “to cheer, to raise” them (CW 1:62).
“Saadi” (W 9:129–35) teaches the same duty. Saadi was “The cheerer
of men’s hearts,” a “joy-giver” who was himself an “enjoyer”: “Sunshine
in his heart transferred / Lighted each transparent word.” By contrast,
those who “Never in the blaze of light / Lose the shudder of midnight”
were as anathema to Emerson as they were to Dante, who consigned
to hell people guilty of “having been dejected in the sweet air that is
gladdened by the sun” (“ . . . Tristi fummo / nell’aere dolce che dal
sol s’allegra”).21 Such gloom, Emerson says, is “least of all . . . to be
pardoned in the literary and speculative class,” who are called upon
to be “professors of the Joyous Science,” or as he puts it elsewhere—
adopting a term applied to fourteenth-century Provençal poetry (gai
saber or gaia sciensa)—of “the gai science” (EL 3:368; W 8:37).
In addition to communicating affirmation and joy, the poet must
also make one’s reading his or her work an experience of aesthetic
21. Dante, Inferno 7.121–22.

Literature 165
pleasure. Great literature, Emerson claims, invites us to “enter into a

region of the purest pleasure accessible to human nature” (W 12:341).
Since hedonism is itself an important ethical orientation, the concep-
tion of literature as intended to give pleasure in no way undermines
the ethical character of literature. This ethical character is all the more
emphasized, however, when Emerson interprets aesthetic pleasure as a
means of uplifting the reader’s heart and spirit, and thus making him or
her more receptive to the positive message the poet or scholar attempts
to convey. Emerson’s position closely resembles that of Coleridge, who
states in Biographia Literaria that “the communication of pleasure is the
introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize
his readers.”22 For Emerson also, poetry plays its part in the ethical
education of humanity by means of its aesthetic power, its ability to
charm and give pleasure.23
Emerson does not regard the reader as the passive recipient of the joy
and hope that literature brings. Only those books are valuable, he says
repeatedly, that put us “in a working mood” (W 7:188; 8:296; 9:331).
This principle has profound implications for the ethics of both writing
and reading. Barbara Packer has shown how thoroughly Emerson’s
unsystematic, discontinuous, reticent, and assertively uncompromis-
ing style reflects not only his belief that language is inadequate as a
conveyor of truth but also his conviction that prose and poetry should
test and provoke the reader, thus challenging him or her to intellectual
activity.24 Emerson applauded Goethe’s “practice to publish his book
without preface & let it lie unexplained” as an expression of “the
scholar’s Ethics”; he credited Walter Savage Landor with “the merit of
not explaining” (JMN 5:187–88; 7:54). For Emerson books have value
only if they “awaken” us to our own creativity, if they stimulate us to
thoughts and actions that are truly our own. By imparting “sympathetic
activity to the moral power” (W 7:190), good books enable us to
rise above them. Rightly conceived, “the one end” of books is “to
inspire” (CW 1:56)—to liberate us from our routine thinking, and
22. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2:131.

23. Questions concerning the relation of pleasure to instruction in poetry are as old
as Hellenistic criticism. Their prominence in later literary discussion is due primarily
to the influence of Horace’s Ars poetica. Coleridge and Emerson but restate positions
that have been debated since antiquity.
24. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 1–21.
from themselves. Only by provoking us into novel thought can poets
be for us “liberating gods” (CW 3:17–18).
Emerson, therefore, praised writers of “tonic books,” such as Goethe
and Coleridge (JMN 10:167). The abuse of books begins when read-
ers, out of misplaced respect for them, cease to read skeptically and
proudly. No matter what the text, we ought “always [to] read as su-
perior beings” (CW 2:4–5), ever mindful that each of us is called
upon to be an original thinker rather than to copy or imitate one.
Emerson has scant respect for those he considers guilty of bibliola-
try (“the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of
all degrees”—CW 1:56). But even approaching books on a higher
level, through receptivity to its thought and art, has its dangers since
“genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence”
(CW 1:57). Hence Emerson’s caution to Charles Woodbury: “Read-
ing long at one time anything, no matter how it fascinates, destroys
thought. . . . Do not permit this. Stop if you find yourself becoming
absorbed, at even the first paragraph. Keep yourself out and watch for
your own impressions.”25
Nevertheless, books, when rightly written—when they open “a
foreground, and like the breath of morning-landscapes invite . . . us
onward”—and read reservedly and confrontationally, “are the best of
things” (CW 4:80; 1:56). No invention of civilization has proved a
more potent factor in human edification. As a reader and a writer,
Emerson put his principles into practice. He was nobody’s disciple,
and he discouraged discipleship in others. Yet his achievement as a
scholar (in his sense of the term) has made him a uniquely powerful
moral force in our world. In view of what he accomplished as a
scholar, Emerson may certainly be forgiven these rhapsodic words
from “Literary Ethics”: “A scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth,
the excellency of his country, the happiest of men” (CW 1:99).
25. Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 29.

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Index
Abrams, M. H., 124, 136–37, 139n12, Basil the Great, Saint, 144
147 Bate, Walter Jackson, 43, 44
Abyss, 71, 72n17 Beck, Lewis White, 61–62
Action: and conscience, 67–68; and Benevolence: and “inward turn” of
character, 75–78; and self-culture, ethics, 16–17; and Being, 37–38; vs.
81–84 beneficence, 68; and other-regarding
Adam Kadmon, 139 ethics, 95–101
Alcmaeon, 71 Bentham, Jeremy, 19
Alcott, Bronson, 157–58, 163 Berkeley, George, 134
Alienation: and nature, 133, 136, Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 32
138–39, 142, 146; and literature, Blake, William, 65n10, 161
163–64 Böhme, Jakob, 62n8, 71
Ambrose, Saint, 144 Brown, Lee Rust, 139
Anselm of Canterbury, Saint, 51 Browne, Sir Thomas, 31–32
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 58 Bryant, William Cullen, 158
Aristotle: on prudence, 8; on akrasia, Buell, Lawrence, 141, 158
8n2; and the passions, 9; on Burke, Edmund, 105
moderation, 10; and law of nature, Burkholder, Robert E., 1
11; and theoretical vs. practical Bush, Douglas, 15
reason, 11–12, 45; and casuistry, Butler, Joseph, 14, 31
12; and intellectual elitism, 24; and
“first philosophy,” 54; and politics, Calvin, John, 32n8
90; on friendship, 110, 111; influence Cambridge Platonists, 17, 18. See also
on Emerson, 111; defines the good Cudworth
life, 115; and empiricism, 132; Carlyle, Thomas: as interpreter of Kant,
mentioned, 15, 44, 57, 58 43, 62; and Goethe, 80; on custom,
Arnold, Matthew, 158 119; on creative literature, 158; as
Augustine, Saint: and will, 8, 37; “prophet,” 161; mentioned, 113
on evil, 37; on time, 53; and Cassirer, Ernst, 8, 121, 135
subjectivity, 70; and language, 150 Cavell, Stanley, 43n26, 61, 91, 91n3,
98n10, 129, 130, 133, 150n4
Babbitt, Irving, 127 Cayton, Mary Kupiec, 102
Bacon, Francis, 15, 54n44, 157 Channing, William Ellery, 79
Baker, Herschel, 24, 70 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 8, 162
Barish, Evelyn, 7, 35 Clarke, Samuel, 14, 18
177
178 Index
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: and Kant, 18, idealism, 35, 132–36; on good and
43, 55, 88; and desynonymization, evil, 36–39, 77–78, 106; knowledge
18, 151; on morality and theoretical of Kant, 42–44; and practical
ignorance, 52; and will, 62, 62n8; reason, 48, 50–52; on simplicity,
and Plotinus, 64n10; and sense of 53, 78, 118–19, 149, 152–53; and
wonder, 123; and organicism, 124; inexplicability of moral law, 53–56;
and nature, 140; and symbol, 148, and ideal of harmony, 63–64, 72;
153; and language, 150–51; on and universality, 63, 84–89; and
genius and talent, 163; on role of transcendent/transcendental, 63n9;
pleasure, 165, 165n23; writes “tonic on guilt, 65; on moral status of
books,” 166 action, 67–68; on self-reverence, 69–
Conscience: law of and virtue, 21; 70; on will, 73–76, 78; his concept
identified with moral sentiment, of self-culture, 78–81; on Goethe,
36, 64; as cognitive faculty, 64; 80, 98, 148, 154, 155, 157, 163,
as cause of disharmony, 65; as 165; on work, 82–83, 120–21; on
conative faculty, 65; and law of striving, 83–84, 139, 145–46; and
compensation, 71 Kant’s categorical imperative, 87–88;
Copleston, Frederick, 37 on influence, 93–95, 165–66; and
Cragg, G. R., 17 benevolence, 95–101; on giving,
Crusius, Christian August, 47 97–98, 100–101; on individual
Cudworth, Ralph, 14, 17, 45 vs. society, 101–7; on friendship
and love, 107–14; on imagination,
Dante Alighieri, 89, 108, 157, 164 117–22; on routine, 119–21; and
Descartes, René, 15–16, 54n44, 134, symbol, 121–22, 148–49, 153–54;
135
on beauty, 122–27, 142–43; on
Desire, 133, 137–38
experience, 127–31; on desire, 137;
Dewey, John, 159
on art, 143–44; as soft determinist,
Dickens, Charles, 99
145; on language, 148–54; on
Doppler, Alfred, 72n17
literary self-expression, 154–61; on
Duty: vs. happiness, 19–20; self-
reverence as a, 69–71; vs. freedom, literature and its audience, 161–66
125–26 —Works: “The American Scholar,” 59,
93, 103, 117, 155, 156, 162, 164;
Eckhart, Meister, 71 “Aristocracy,” 125; “Brahma,” 38;
Edelstein, Ludwig, 19, 70 “The Character of Socrates,” 7, 8;
Edwards, Jonathan, 66 “Circles,” 48; The Conduct of Life,
Emerson, Edward Waldo, 120 126, 162; Divinity School “Address,”
Emerson, Mary Moody, 35 33, 36, 55, 70, 92, 100, 103, 118, 119,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: early interest 126, 137, 157; Early Lectures, 39,
in ethics, 1, 7; and Greek ethics, 2, 41; English Traits, 112n26; “Ethics,”
8–14; on ethics and nature, 10, 11, 70; “Étienne de la Boéce,” 111;
39–41, 133, 134, 136–46; and moral “Experience,” 64, 128; “Friendship,”
sense/moral sentiment, 17–18, 108, 112–13, 122; “The Heart,” 111;
34–36; and happiness, 20–21; on “Human Culture,” 132; “Intellect,”
virtue, 21; and ethical egalitarianism, 153; “Lectures on the Times,”
24–25; and system, 26–27, 75; on 103; “Literary Ethics,” 156, 162,
ethics and religion, 30–33, 55–56; 166; “Literature,” 155; “Manners,”
and pantheism, 33, 34, 36, 39–40, 122; “Man the Reformer,” 162;
56, 79, 85, 86n39, 144, 145; and “Merops,” 153; Nature, 32–33,
Index 179
51, 72, 118, 133, 141, 145; “The 76; and Bildung, 78, 80–81, 98; and
Over-Soul,” 118; “The Philosophy morality, 80, 154; and striving, 83;
of History,” 59; Poems (1846), 158; on cultural inheritance, 93; and
“The Poet,” 163; “Politics,” 105; “The “beautiful enemy,” 110; on nature,
Preacher,” 33; “The Present State of 119, 163; on “necessity” in art,
Ethical Philosophy,” 7, 8, 14, 31; 124; and symbolic language, 148,
Representative Men, 42, 98; (“Uses of 149, 153; and scholar’s ethics, 155,
Great Men”), 157; “Saadi,” 155, 164; 165; as edifying thinker, 159; writes
“Self-Reliance,” 36, 73, 97, 157, 162; “tonic books,” 166
“The Sovereignty of Ethics,” 126, Good, the: as Being, 37–39; and the
157; “The Transcendentalist,” 63n9; beautiful, 126–27
“The Young American,” 163 Good life, the: and culture, 13;
Engell, James, 43, 44 definitions of, 47, 115; and
Epictetus, 116 imagination, 117–22; and beauty,
Epicurus/Epicureanism, 57, 132 122–27; and experience, 127–31
Ethical intuitionism, 18, 25, 47, 57, Goodman, Russell B., 133, 134
63, 69, 84 Greek ethics: continued relevance of,
Ethics: defined, 1–2; and mathematics, 1, 14; and will, 8; intellectualism
11–12, 19; “inward turn” of, 16–17; in, 8–9, 24, 41; and moderation,
and Common Sense philosophy, 22, 9–10; and cosmic order, 10–11; and
24–25, 26; and worth, 25–26; its happiness, 19–20
fundamental concepts indefinable, Greenough, Horatio, 125
27, 34, 36, 52–54; and religion, Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, 144
30–33; and politics, 90; and Grotius, Hugo, 22–23
language, 147, 149–53; and literary Guthrie, W. K. C., 132
modernity, 158. See also Metaethics,
Normative ethics Hallengren, Anders, 4, 11, 92, 111
Evil: as privation, 37–39; positive role Hamann, Johann Georg, 149
of, 77–78, 106 Happiness: and Greek ethics, 19–20;
Experience: and everyday life, 127–31; and eighteenth-century ethics,
and literature, 156–57 20–21
Harmony: as ideal, 63; and conscience,
Fichte, Immanuel Hermann von, 26 64–72; and character, 73–78; and
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: on philosophy self-culture, 78–84
and temperament, 4; and system, Harpham, Geoffrey, 2
26–27; on Kant, 42; and promotion Hartmann, Nicolai, 117, 126, 134n4,
of moral self, 62; on subjugation of 145
nature, 137; mentioned, 31 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 45
Fiering, Norman, 17, 67n13, 95 Hedonism, 121, 165
Findlay, J. N., 138 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich:
Friedrich, Hugo, 101 on truth vs. certainty, 15; on
Frost, Barzillai, 156 personhood, 23; as objective idealist,
Frye, Northrop, 5 35; on freedom as law of ethics,
40; and “unhappy consciousness,”
Genius: and morality, 81, 154–55; and 65; on master-slave relationship,
talent, 156, 162–63; and influence, 65, 82–83; on the negative, 71; his
166 concept of universality, 84–87; on
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: on Kant, recognition, 91; on benevolence,
4; and Plotinus, 65n10, on action, 99; on definition, 132–33; on
180 Index
understanding, 136; on desire, 138; 140; his influence, 42–45; on
on nature, 140; on art, 143, 158 freedom, 49–52; and inexplicability
Heidegger, Martin, 159 of moral law, 52–55; and the
Heller, Agnes, 115 sublime, 54n45, 140; on God,
Heraclitus, 64 55–56; desubstantializes the self,
Hobbes, Thomas, 16–17 59–61; and promotion of moral self,
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 83 61; on personhood, 61–62, 91, 109;
Hopkins, Samuel, 66 and transcendent/transcendental,
Hopkins, Vivian C., 154 63n9; on intuition, 63n9; on
Horace, 165n23 principle vs. action, 68–69; on
Hösle, Vittorio, 35n13, 161n17 self-reverence, 69–70; on will, 76;
Howe, Daniel Walker: on moral and universality, 84–85, 96; and
sense in America, 18, 95; on categorical imperative, 84, 87–88,
moral perceptions, 22; on Scottish 91, 140n15; on maxim, 84n35; on
Common Sense philosophy, 25; self-love, 96; on friendship, 109,
on ethicization of religion, 31; on 112; on aesthetic experience, 126;
Unitarians’ God, 55; on Unitarians and experience, 128; and idealism,
and harmony, 73 133–35; on desire, 137–38; and
Hume, David: on happiness, 20–21; “Kingdom of Ends,” 140n15;
on moral judgment, 21–22; and mentioned, 4, 31, 159
theoretical vs. practical reason, 45; Kateb, George, 110, 110n22
desubstantializes the self, 59–61; Kierkegaard, Søren, 159
and memory, 62; on experience, Krusche, Thomas, 144n19
128; mentioned, 7, 31 Kuhn, Dorothea, 80n29
Hutcheson, Francis: as critic of
Hobbes, 16; and moral sense,
La Boétie, Étienne de, 111
17–18, 95; criticized by Price,
17n19; and mathematics, 19; and Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 61
Utilitarianism, 20, 57, 96; criticized Landor, Walter Savage, 165
by Kant, 47 Lanson, Gustave, 160
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 37
Jacobson, David, 48n34, 133n3 Leonidas, 142
James, Henry, 113 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 83
James, William, 159 Locke, John, 7, 23
Jesus Christ, 7, 79–80, 92–93, 126, Lockridge, Laurence S., 31, 58, 102,
158 116, 151n5
John Chrysostom, Saint, 32 Lopez, Michael, 83n32, 90, 133n3, 137
Johnson, Samuel, 142 Lowell, James Russell, 158
Jonsen, Albert R., 12, 26 Luther, Martin, 79, 94, 105
Kant, Immanuel: and systematization Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 158

in ethics, 13; and self-reliance, 14, McFarland, Thomas, 26, 62n8, 75
94–95; and Bacon, 15; on reason, MacIntyre, Alasdair, 14
18, 27, 45–50, 52; on happiness, Manichaeanism, 37
21; and nonphilosophical moral Marcus Aurelius, 9, 87
thought, 24; on ethics and human Marx, Leo, 144n19
imperfection, 26; as deontologist, Mather, Cotton, 32, 35
28–29; revolutionizes epistemology, Matthew, Father, 107
39; on nature, 41, 79, 134–35, Melville, Herman, 153
Index 181
Metaethics: defined, 29; and autonomy Perception, 22, 35

of ethics, 30–33; and status of good Personhood, 22–24, 61–63, 70, 91,
and evil, 36–39; and relation of 100, 109
ethics to nature, 39–41; and relation Phidias, 89
of ethics to knowledge, 41–42, 45, Phillips, Wendell, 101
49, 52 Plato: on prudence, 8; on moral health
Michael, John, 7n1, 110 as order, 9, 71–72; on moderation,
Milton, John, 77, 78, 105, 158 10; on ethics and cosmic order,
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 70, 10–11; and scientific approach to
101, 110–11, 157, 160 ethics, 11–12; and grounding of
Moral sense/moral sentiment: in ethics, 12–13, 14; on moral law as
eighteenth-century ethics, 17– essence of reality, 35; as concrete
18, 47; indefinable, 34, 36; has universal, 89; on love, 112–14;
universal authority, 34–36; essence defines the good life, 115; on the
of humanness, 35, 36; as cognitive good and the beautiful, 127; and
faculty, 36 idealism, 132, 134; on falsehood,
Morris, William, 120 149; mentioned, 27, 41, 112n26
Moses, 92 Plotinus, 37, 64, 72n17, 132
Mott, Wesley T., 152 Plutarch, 24, 112n26
Murdoch, Iris, 75 Pochmann, Henry A., 44, 50
Poirier, Richard, 133n3
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 61 Porte, Joel, 2–3, 126, 160
Napoleon Bonaparte, 144 Price, Richard, 14, 17, 18, 31
Nature: as moral norm, 10; law of, Property, and personhood, 22–23
11, 22–23; and reason, 11; and Protagoras, 10
metaethics, 39–41; symbolizes Prudence, 8, 66, 96–97
moral truths, 41; its ontological
status, 130, 132–33; as “other me,” Raphael, D. Daiches, 17
130, 136; and language, 148–49 Reid, Thomas, 14, 17–18, 24–25, 26,
Neufeldt, Leonard, 144 45, 95
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 60, 66, 97, 98, Richardson, Robert D., 1, 4, 22, 53n43,
110n22, 127, 159 128
Normative ethics: and value, 19, 28; Robinson, David M.: on later Emerson
and obligation, 19, 28–29; and as moralist, 3–4; on Emerson’s
teleology, 28; and deontology, subjectivism, 39n18; on Emerson’s
28–29 fundamental moral principle, 66;
Nussbaum, Martha C., 1, 111n25 on Emerson and Unitarian doctrine
of probation, 77; on Emerson’s
O’Connell, Daniel, 107 concept of self-culture, 78–79; on
Origen, 144 Emerson’s view of individual and
Orwell, George, 151 society, 102; on modern everyday
Otto, Rudolf, 72n17 life, 118n5; on Emerson and dignity
of work, 120n10; on Emerson’s
Packer, Barbara, 38, 73, 117, 139, 165 passion for reality, 128; on Emerson
Paley, William, 14, 21 and pragmatism, 133n3
Parmenides, 10 Rochester, John Wilmot, Second Earl
Pascal, Blaise, 119 of, 80
Paton, H. J., 60 Rorty, Richard, 15–16, 159–60
Paul, Saint, 105 Rotch, Mary, 53
182 Index
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 70, 99 modern ethics, 13; on dignity, 14;
Russell, Lord William, 142 on Descartes, 16; on recognition,
91n3; on definition of the good life,
Santayana, George, 159 115
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Thoreau, Henry David, 14, 59, 72, 102,
von, 35, 62n8, 71, 72n17, 135 141
Schiller, Friedrich, 74, 138–39, 153 Thucydides, 112, 112n26, 152
Scholem, Gershom, 139n12 Thurin, Erik, 110n22, 139n12
Self-realizationism: as form of Toulmin, Stephen, 12, 26, 140
teleological ethics, 57–58; and crisis
of the self, 58–59, 63 Universality: of moral law, 34–35; as
Seneca the Philosopher, 9, 25 ideal, 63; as moral criterion, 84,
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 85, 87–88, 96; and self-realization,
Third Earl of, 16–18, 58, 95 84–87, 88–89; and language,
Shakespeare, William, 78, 89, 130, 157 148–49
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 161 Utilitarianism, 13, 20, 28, 57, 96
Slavery, 23, 84, 99, 106–7, 151–52
Smith, Adam, 14 Valentinus, 72n17
Socrates: as founder of Western Vane, Sir Henry, 142
philosophical ethics, 1, 13; and will, Van Leer, David, 42, 133
8; and prudence, 8; and rational self- Vlastos, Gregory, 113
objectification, 9; and moderation,
9; Emerson misinterprets, 10; and Ward, Anna Barker, 117
law of nature, 10; as exemplar of Ware, Henry, Jr., 73
moral life, 13–14; on moral law Weber, Max, 116
as essence of reality, 35; on love, Webster, Daniel, 107, 151
112; defines the good life, 115; Weinrich, Harald, 150n2
mentioned, 2, 13, 20, 21, 41, 58, 97, Wellek, René, 45, 88
105 West, Cornel, 48, 133n3
Solomon, 157 Whicher, Stephen, 2–3, 56, 145
Spinoza, Baruch, 19, 66, 71, 72n17 Whitehead, Alfred North, 105
Staël, Germaine Necker, Madame de, Whitman, Walt, 59, 164
41 Will: in Greek ethics, 8; in Augustine,
Stewart, Dugald, 14, 18, 26, 44, 50, 95 8, 37; freedom of, 40–41, 49–52,
Stoicism: intellectualist ethics of, 9, 74–75, 78; and self-definition,
24; and the passions, 9; and law of 62–63; in German thought, 62n8;
nature, 11, 87; and happiness, 19, as locus of character, 73–74; and
20; and self-reverence, 70; and Kant, action, 75–76
87–88; defines the good life, 115; Williams, Bernard, 1, 29, 44, 61
mentioned, 57, 58 Wills, Garry, 20
Striving: and self-realization, 62, Wimmer, Reiner, 35n10
83–84; as moral concept, 133, Windelband, Wilhelm, 62, 72n17
134n4; and nature, 136, 138–39, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 104–5, 150, 159
145–46 Wood, Allen W., 20, 23, 85
Sullivan, Roger J., 47, 50, 61, 67n14 Woodbury, Charles, 166
Wordsworth, William, 117, 123–24
Taylor, A. E., 12 Work, 81–83, 120–21
Taylor, Charles: on ethics and cosmic
order, 11; on systematization in Zoja, Luigi, 144n21

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Emerson’s Ethics

University of Missouri Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van Cromphout, Gustaaf.

Designer: Stephanie Foley

This book has been published with the

5. Everyday Life 115

Works Cited 167

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the debts of gratitude I have incurred

For references to Emerson’s works, I use the following abbreviations:

CEC The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Edited by Joseph

A mong the questions that confronted Emerson in the course

I shall not have much more to say about Emerson as a moralist.

A related assumption is that although Emerson was an exciting, even

4. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics, 2.

Emerson nowhere shows greater affinity to the [British] eighteenth

traces Emerson’s evolution from mystic to pragmatist, empha-

6. Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, 68.

Robinson’s book, in a word, is a masterful study of how Emerson’s

One of the signal merits of Robert D. Richardson’s biography,

sanctioned philosophy entails that every true philosopher “must cope

9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre,” Sämmtliche

E merson’s interest in ethics bore literary fruit early. In his late

1. Evelyn Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy, 102–4. On Emerson’s confrontation

stresses the primacy of knowledge when he says that Socrates “directs

4. Plato, Republic 444D-E.

5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.6–9; Plato, Symposium 209A.

more fundamentally, in Charles Taylor’s words, “the order of things in

9. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.7.

early allegiance to this Platonic view is obvious when he says that an

12. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 76.

Emerson devotes the remaining pages (106–35) of “The Present State

13. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 15.

“Form of the Good” proved unconvincing to his most brilliant pupil,

by the rapid advancement of the collateral philosophy of the mind

Emerson is here drawing our attention to the predominance of epis-

rationality is no longer defined substantively, in terms of the order

This “inward turn” had profound implications for ethics. To quote

More than the traditional Christian virtue of charity, “benevolence”

20. Raphael, The Moral Sense, 152–53.

Some general comments about “modern ethics” provide additional

24. Ludwig Edelstein, The Meaning of Stoicism, 1.

25. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, 149–64,

Emerson recognizes the subjectivity in the modern conception of

Morality . . . consists not in any matter of fact, which can be dis-

26. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 63–66.

Not surprisingly, Emerson condemns Hume’s attempts “to represent

28. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 468–69.

ethics as a matter of rights, of individual rights: the natural law is

31. Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace 1.1.4.

In every family of ordinary advantages in the middle ranks of life

What gives distinction to humans on the moral level is not, there-

34. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 31.

38. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A vii.

E merson’s position as a moralist is more readily understood if

1. Cf. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 79.

of duty. Kant’s uncompromising adherence to the deontological view

Yesterday I was asked what I mean by Morals. I reply that I cannot

The present chapter will examine Emerson’s metaethics, and sub-

2. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:397–99.

Emerson’s metaethical efforts were directed primarily toward estab-

of Butler, Price, Hume, Kant, and Fichte. But as Laurence Lockridge

4. Laurence S. Lockridge, The Ethics of Romanticism, 21.